The Voicebot Podcast

As promised, today I have part 2 of our 2020 predictions shows. Today, we take a deep dive into multiple conversations about voice app architecture. This is important because it determines how we develop for voice and what governs user experience. I have three guests today that will break down for you what they expect to change in 2020. John Kelvie from Bespoken joins us from Peru and marks a return to the podcast to talk about how "domains" will replace voice apps. He is followed by Tim McElreath from Discovery and Food Network who discusses his prediction about the "de-appification" of Alexa skills and Assistant agents. We conclude with a conversation with Voiceflow's Braden Ream and his theory about the rise of "intentless" voice apps. This episode finishes up our series that brings you insights from voice AI leaders in six countries on four continents. Enjoy!

Today we have part 1 of a two-part series on 2020 predictions with guests from Australia, the UK, and Holland. I want to give a shoutout to all of the Voice Insider subscribers that offered their predictions for 2020. We had 46 of them in all and you can read the full story at Voicebot.ai. Today, I have 3 of them on the mic to elaborate on their predictions and we will have three more in the next episode. We start this week with the view from Asia and Australia from Matt Ware of First, a leading digital and voice agency. He has predictions about the rise of Asia in voice and what will happen with discovery on the leading platforms this year. Next we talk Apple and Siri with Katy Bass of Altavox in the UK. Will there be a Siri OS? Will Apple do something meaningful with Siri in 2020? Katy shares her perspective. We wrap up Part 1 with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald who joins us from Holland and discusses the single word that will describe the sentiment around voice in 2020. We even score whether his 2019 prediction came to pass. Is there a voice winter? Maarten has some thoughts on that too. Enjoy!

Patricia Scanlon is CEO and founder of Soapbox Labs, the leader in automated speech recognition for kids. You may have observed a child attempting to use an Alexa or Google Assistant device and noticed the success rate of those interactions was noticeably lower than when you use it. A big part of that is due to the fact that the speech recognition models in leading voice assistants are tuned toward adult speech patterns, tone, and enunciation. Scanlon points out that children have shorter and thinner vocal cords and have often not learned how to enunciate properly. That means the speech recognition models tuned for adults are looking for the wrong cues when attempting to discern speech from children and the poor results are predictable. Scanlon began noticing this problem in 2012 and 13 and decided to set out to solve the problem. That has led Soapbox into both the Education Tech and Toys and Games markets. Today we discuss the technology and the applications related to speech recognition for children and even how her company is moving toward developing entirely edge-based solutions with large vocabulary voice recognition that never needs to send data to the cloud. We go deep and wide on this topic that gets too little attention but is likely to shape the experiences of the generation of children born from this point forward. Scanlon earned her PhD in speech recognition with a focus in signal processing and machine learning at the University College Dublin. She also has an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronics engineering. Before founding Soapbox in 2013, Scanlon worked for seven years as a researcher at Bell Labs of Alcatel Lucent.

2019 started out with unbounded optimism around voice technology with rapid smart speaker adoption and Google announcing over 1 billion devices supported the Assistant. It continued with Microsoft pulling Cortana from consumer use case and Samsung adding new capabilities to Bixby while Amazon and Google rapidly expanded features. Then, we had the negative stories about contractors listening to voice assistant conversations and threats of new security vulnerabilities for smart speakers. The year is concluding with new products and continued robust sales of everything with a voice assistant. Milkana Brace, CEO of Jargon, Ravi Lal, CEO of Voxly Digital, and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai join host Bret Kinsella breaking down the stories from 2019 and discussing what mattered and what didn't over the past year.

What are hearables? They are wireless earbuds and headphones that provide always-available voice assistant access. Think AirPods, Pixel Buds, Echo Buds, Galaxy buds. At home, you have an always-listening smart speaker but on the go having that just in your phone is a bit limiting. Connecting the voice assistant from a smartphone to your ears creates a more efficient and private interaction. Today we talk about the technology underlying hearables and why we aren't getting 12-hour, all-day battery life. We also discuss applications, consumer adoption, and how the big players intend to compete. 2020 is going to see a lot more hearables action driven by new apps and new products such as AirPods Pro and Amazon Echo Buds. Dave Kemp works for Oaktree products, the leading U.S. distributor of hearing aids and an expert in the hearables space ranging from prescription solutions to consumer products such as AirPods. He is also a contributor to Voicebot.ai on hearables topics and has his own regular podcast and blog called Future Ear. Also, with us is Andy Bellavia. He has a long tenure in the sound and hearing market with past work for consumer hearables innovator Bragi, hearing aid tech company Nuheara and currently as a BD lead for Knowles Corp. — a company that has components in the new Amazon Echo Buds.

Privacy and security issues associated with voice assistants have been the biggest stories in the industry so far in 2019. Joining host Bret Kinsella are Rani Molla, the lead data reporter for Recode, Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, and Martin Lens-FitzGerald of Open Voice and several other voice-related projects. Molla offers the media perspective, Mozer a 25 year veteran of the industry with in-depth knowledge of privacy and security issues offers some unique insights and Lens-FitzGerald tackles the questions from a European viewpoint. It's a holiday season discussion focused on whether consumers actually care about the intersection of voice assistants, privacy, and security and where we are headed.

Jeff McMahon is CEO and co-founder of Voicify a voice app development platform designed for enterprise marketers. After a career in digital marketing as an agency founder, Jeff and his co-founders saw the need for voice app software that would integrate well with the existing marketing technology stack and be designed for how marketers perform their jobs. We talk about development, day-to-day use, and the many integrations enterprise marketers expect. In addition to his work at Voicify, Jeff is also managing partner of Martech Ventures and investment firm focused on marketing technology. Earlier in his career, he was a board member and Chief Strategy Officer at digital consultancy Rightpoint and founder and CEO of Oasis Technology Partners, an interactive marketing agency. Jeff earned a BA in neuroscience from Hamilton College and an MBA from Cornell.

Tom Hewitson is CEO and founder of Labworks.io, a voice app studio in London known from some of the most popular games on Alexa such as Would You Rather, Trivia Hero, True or False and Mental Samurai hosted by actor Rob Lowe. In this week's episode, Tom offers 10 Hot Takes from 2.5 Years in voice based on his presentation at the All About Voice Conference in Munich. He touches on some controversial topics such as lack of discovery, how closed platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant stifle innovation, the lack of return on multimodal efforts, too much focus on persona, and lack of monetization. It's a rare dose of unvarnished honesty from a voice developer in a public forum. Tom Hewitson founded Labworks in 2016 as a chatbot consultancy but shifted into voice apps about a year later. Before Labworks, Tom worked as a freelance journalist and a content designer. He spent time as a digital editor for Lonely Planet and a content strategist at Facebook. He earned an M.S. in political journalism and TV production from City University London and an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Sussex.

Four independent developers discuss their experience building for Samsung Bixby and react to announcements from Samsung Developer Conference 2019, including Bixby Views, templates and working with the IDE. The interviews are conducted onsite at the San Jose Convention Center at SDC19. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Cory Wixom of Baby Stats, Piyush Hari of Dilli Labs, Lei Xiang from Volley, and Ryan Weiss of Home Advisor.

This week we have four interviews conducted onsite at ConverCon in Dublin in October 2019. First up is Katie McMahon, GM of SoundHound, a leading custom voice assistant development platform, and my guest on Episode #1 of the Voicebot Podcast. Next in line is Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs. Soapbox is a pioneer around speech recognition for children. Then we have Dustin Coates, the voice search lead at Algolia, a leader in enterprise search. We finish up with Mr. ConverCon himself, Paul Sweeney. He is a co-founder of Webio and is on the front lines launching conversational products for contact centers. Paul also is one of the key organizers of ConverCon which just completed its third year.