The Voicebot Podcast

This week's interviews are all about the intersection of podcasts (the content) and voice assistants (the channel). Interviews were conducted onsite at the Podcast Movement conference. Guests include Zack Reneau-Wedeen of Google followed by Tom Webster from Edison Research, Suzy Schulz of Westwood One, Will Mayo of Spoken Layer and Steve Goldstein from Amplifi Media. We close with Ahmed Bouzid and Brielle Nickoloff from Witlingo. In all, seven guests weigh in on the intersection of podcasts and voice.

David Isbitski joined the Alexa team in early 2015, shortly after the Amazon Echo launched and before Alexa Skills Kit or the skill store. When he started, it was all about developer office hours, slack groups, and meetups. Today, it is more often about conference keynotes and boardrooms. Bret Kinsella interviewed Dave at the Voice 19 Conference to get a sense about how things have changed over the past five years and what that means going forward for voice assistant adoption. Isbitski is currently chief evangelist for Alexa and before 2015 he held a similar role for the Amazon App Store. Prior to that, he spent 6 years as a technical evangelist at Microsoft and earlier in his career he was a technology manager at J&J and a Principal at BT.

Adam Cheyer is co-founder and VP of Engineering of Viv Labs and Vice President of R&D at Samsung. He is also a founding member of Change.org and Sentient. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Siri and a director of engineering at Apple. Earlier in his career, Adam held executive roles at SRI International in the computer-human interaction center and the artificial intelligence center. He earned an undergraduate computer science degree from Brandeis and an MS in computer science from UCLA. He is a pioneer in the world of voice assistants building his first over 25 years ago. Here is my interview with Adam onsite at Voice 19.

Voicebot recently surveyed over 300 marketers to determine their enthusiasm and activity around voice assistants as a marketing channel. That report includes 20 charts and 30 pages of analysis and can be downloaded at no cost at voicebot.ai/research. In this episode, host Bret Kinsella is joined by David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.com, and Ava Mutchler of Voicebot.ai for an in-depth discussion of the key findings. The discussion was originally recorded as a webinar and used a format that allows podcast listeners to follow along. How many marketers have launched voice apps? Which voice assistants do they favor today and which will be the best long-term bets? What types of voice apps are most common? These and several other topics are reviewed. It's time to go data diving and figure out marketer sentiment and activity in the voice app ecosystem.

Voice Summit 19 was the largest gathering of voice industry professionals globally in 2019. Voicebot took the opportunity to speak with six industry leaders to get their perspective on the conference, where voice adoption has been and where it is headed. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Amir Hirsh, CEO of Audioburst, Bruce Rase, CEO of AgVoice, Steven Tingiris, CEO of Dabble Labs, Pat Higbie, CEO of XAPPmedia, Guilio Caperdoni, head of innovation at Videmme Consulting, and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, the global head of voice at Nodes Agency.

This week's episode is the audio from a recent webinar focused on the results of the Voice Assistant SEO Report for Brands. Ben Fisher of Magic + Co. and Ava Mutchler from Voicebot.ai join as guests to discuss the results. The report included results from over 4,000 questions about 200 consumer brands asked of Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, and Siri. The results surprised many because they were much worse than voice assistants typically do on general knowledge questions and ran counter to what SEO consultants are recommending. We discuss the implications for brands and what they should do to raise their profile on voice assistants.

There have been so many rich insights offered by Voicebot Podcast guests that I wanted to figure out a simple way to unlock a few of those nuggets in case you missed the episodes. I also wanted to hear some discussion among dedicated and erudite listeners about what was said by past guests and what they thought mattered most. With 100 episodes to choose from, we narrowed it down by asking listeners to let me know their favorite episodes and why. Our panelists also weighed in and by my count, we discussed at least 23 episodes. Amy Stapleton of Tellables, Pete Haas from Conversation Curve, and Dave Kemp from Oaktree join me on the 100 episode retrospective. What a long, fruitful trip it's been. Hear comments about episodes that included Adam Cheyer, Ron Croen, Cathy Pearl, Dave Isbitski, Lisa Falkson, Karen Kaushansky, Vijay Balasubramanian, Brad Abrams, and many more.

The first half of 2019 started with data around big growth numbers for smart speakers over the previous year, Amazon saying there were more than 100 million Alexa enabled devices, followed within a week by Google announcing there were over 1 billion devices with Google Assistant. That was followed by a lot of voice assistant news across multiple devices ranging from patio umbrellas to motorcycle helmets from the U.S. and China at CES. As the year progressed many more stories followed about on-device performance, new voice assistant features, new enterprise applications, and notably, issues and news items focused on privacy and security. Joining me today are Pete Erickson of Modev, Ben Fox Rubin of CNET, and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. They share their thoughts on the news that was most noteworthy thus far in 2019.

There are five guests in this week's episode that all attended and presented at the recent AI, Bots, and Marketing meetup in New York City. We are joined by Matt Hartman, a partner at Betaworks. He is followed by Brandon Kaplan, CEO of voice-focused agency Skilled Creative. Those were both recorded on site prior to the event and are followed by some post-event interviews with Claire Mitchell of Vayner Media, Saqib Muhammad and Zohaib Ahmed from Resemble Ai. We conclude with Alec Lazarescu, the organizer for the largest AI meetup in NYC.

Rupal Patel is the founder and CEO of VocaliD. She founded the company in 2014 to provide voice prostheses for people that cannot speak in their own voices. The company continues with that work today and has expanded into customized voices for brands looking for a distinctive sound in their efforts around voice assistants. VocaliD was a Mass Challenge finalist in 2014 where it participated in the accelerator program. Patel has also been a professor at Northeastern University for the past 16 years with joint appointments in the departments of health science and computer science. She also holds an affiliate faculty position at Harvard and MIT for the Division of Health Science and Technology but focuses her attention today on VocaliD. Early in her career while studying for her doctorate, Rupal also spent time as a speech pathologist. She earned a Ph.D. in Speech Language Pathology from the University of Toronto and an undergraduate degree in Neuropsychology from the University of Calgary. Patel completed her post-doc work at MIT.