The Voicebot Podcast

Dr. Larry Heck is CEO of Viv Labs and a Senior Vice President at Samsung. In that role, he oversees all things Bixby. Prior to his work with Bixby, Larry served as head of Samsung's Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Center. He has a deep background and distinguished career in both voice and AI technologies. Prior to Samsung, he was a Research Director at Google leading the Deep Dialogue project. Earlier in his career, he was chief scientist for Microsoft Speech, a Vice President of R&D at Nuance, and a Senior Research Engineer at SRI International. Larry earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech and his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.

Sanjay Dhawan is CEO of Cerence, the recent spin-out company from what used to be known as Nuance Automotive. On October 1st it became a separate company and currently has a half a billion-dollar market cap and $300 million in forecasted 2019 revenue. Cerence has over 60 automotive customers and its technology can be found in 280 million vehicles. Previously, Dhawan was CTO of Harman International and President of the Connected Services Division. He joined Harman through an acquisition of Symphony Teleca where he was President and CEO. He has held a number of other executive and technical positions at leading technology companies. Sanjay earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Brunel University in England. Cerence is the biggest player today for in-vehicle voice assistants but competition in the space has become fierce. It's a great conversation about the past, present, and future of voice and AI in the car.

This week's interviews were conducted onsite at the All About Voice Conference in Munich, Germany. That enabled us to capture the European (and Isreali and even some U.S.) perspective on voice assistant adoption. The five guests come from France, Germany, Isreal, and Poland. We discuss European voice assistant adoption, voice UX design principles, open source versus proprietary software approaches, voice assistant experiments in primary education, voice in podcasting and media, and enterprise voice adoption. Guests appear in this order: - 3:08 Jan König, co-founder and CEO of Jovo - 13:35 Adva Levin, founder and CEO of Pretzl Labs - 25:18 Alexis Hue, Managing Director at Voice & You, Partner at Via ID - 36:39 Karol Stryja, Chief Podcast Officer at Abstra - 44:45 Tim Kahle, co-founder and CEO of 169 Labs

During the Voice 19 conference, I had the opportunity to host a panel discussion of enterprise voice leaders from Nestle, Royal Bank of Canada, and the American Red Cross. We discuss the first multimodal Alexa skill, Nestle Goodness, with Josh Baillon who also reviewed the company's voice strategy pillars of search, commerce, and utility. And, we hit on lessons learned around voice app discovery. Royal Bank of Canada's Ryan Matthews talked about a variety of financial services use cases and the need for continuous voice experiences as users switch between a speaker, the car, and wireless earbuds. He also goes into depth on the organizational structure behind how RBC's innovation lab works across divisions. Michelle Mullenax of the American Red Cross also discusses her very lean voice innovation organization model and how that has yielded novel skills for blood donation, first aid, and disaster response. The former skill enables account linking and scheduling of blood donations as well as more information around the procedures. All three guests offered an insider's viewpoint on what it takes to bring the idea of a voice app to production from within large, global organizations.

Financial services has become one of the leading industries driving the adoption of voice ad AI technologies. At the Voice 19 conference this year I hosted a panel with Adam Kaye, VP of Architecture Global Business Technology Solutions for Prudential Financial; Mark Jamison, Global Head of Innovation Design for Visa; and, Sunayna Tuteja, head of strategic partnership and emerging technologies at TD Ameritrade. We talk about how voice AI is impacting these companies in their relationships with consumers, partners, and internal operations, and where the technology is headed.

Amazon held its annual Alexa product launch event in September 2019 and there were some expected announcements along with a few surprises. Hearables, smart glasses, smart home, Samuel L. Jackson, Alexa Auto and many more topics were covered in more than 80 announcements. Breaking it all down for you this week are Amazon VP of smart home Daniel Rausch, USA Today's Jefferson Graham, Chris Albrecht of The Spoon, and Ben Fox Rubin from CNET. Voicebot's Bret Kinsella also offers his "hot take" on the key themes of significance from the event.

Chris Mitchell is CEO and founder of Audio Analytic. He has a Ph.D. in information retrieval from Anglia Ruskin University and also holds degrees in audio and music technology and electrical and electronics engineering. He filed a patent for some of the core technology behind Audio Analytic more than a decade ago after completing his Ph.D. and then accepted a Kaufman Fellowship for entrepreneurship in 2007. He returned to Anglia as a lecturer and researcher and founded Audio Analytic in 2010. You may be familiar with speech recognition and how it helps Alexa and Siri understand what you are saying. Audio Analytic is focused on non-speech sound recognition such as sirens, crashes, alarms, and other sonic qualities that occur in our environment.

Jeff Adams is best known for leading the ASR team that built Amazon's Alexa and we went into that history in-depth in episode 59 last year. He has accumulated over 20 patents in speech technology since the 1990s working as an engineer and CTO for some of the biggest names in the industry. Today, Jeff is CEO of Cobalt Speech which helps develop voice technology for new applications beyond what you see from Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. He shares 10 of these innovative applications in this week's episode to illustrate how broadly voice technology will soon impact our daily lives. Jeff has worked on some of these solutions, others he has observed in the market, and a few are still yet to come

Gene Munster is managing partner at Loup Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage investing. We discuss Apple's voice strategy, Voice SEO data, smart speaker sales forecasts and much more. Munster co-founded Loup after 21 years as a research analyst at Piper Jaffrey where he covered familiar names such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. During his career, he has been named Top Stock Picker from Forbes, Best on the Street from The Wall Street Journal, and was widely followed for his Apple coverage. Gene holds a bachelor's degree in finance and entrepreneurship from the University of St. Thomas. At Loup, Gene writes nearly daily on a variety of topics and often these stories relate to voice.

Braden Ream is co-founder and CEO of Voiceflow which was officially founded in 2018. The company initially started around the idea of creating a new company to support the rise of voice assistants and that led the team to create several interactive children's stories using Storyline. They then decided to build their own software to better meet their needs and this software so intrigued investors that Voiceflow pivoted to a code-free voice app development, design, and prototyping platform in late 2018. Braden is a graduate of the Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada. Voiceflow is headquartered in Toronto and there are 15,000 registered users of the platform which hosts over 5,000 voice apps.