The Voicebot Podcast

Today's episode is a compilation of six interviews captured onsite at Amazon's inaugural Re: MARS conference earlier this month. MARS stands for Machine Learning, AI, Robots, and Space, and it is designed to showcase what Amazon thinks about the future of tech. We have a great lineup to discuss the Alexa Conversations and the cross-skill goal completion announcements as well as innovations on display ranging from neural detection from wrist movements to drone delivery and how we interact with robots. I purposely asked a couple of people to join the discussion that are not part of the voice industry so we could also get a perspective about some of the other innovations that Amazon and its partners had on display. First up, we have Dylan Zwick form Pulse Labs followed by James Wilsterman of game developer Volley. Third and fourth in line are Stu Miniman from The Cube and Silicon Angle followed by Jeffrey Dastin of Reuters. We conclude with John Gillilam of Bondad.fm and Steve Arkonovich of Philosophical Creations. So, we have two long-time developers and voice industry company founders to start us off with commentary about Alexa Conversations. In the middle, we have two Amazon and tech industry watchers discussing topics beyond voice that you may find both relevant and interesting. We close with two developers that taught themselves to code so they could participate in the Alexa ecosystem, have had substantial success with Alexa skills and they weigh in on Alexa and other technologies they saw at Re: MARS.

Audrey Arbeeny is an Emmy Award Winning Executive Producer and Creative Director that is also the founder of Audiobrain, a leading sonic branding agency. Sonic branding is brand strategy and production based on sound. In Audiobrain's model, sonic branding includes strategy, original composition, sound design, audio identities, music supervision and licensing, research and usability, voice casting, education, UI design and more. Audrey founded the company 16 years ago after many years as a senior producer at Elias Arts where she started the sound branding division. Since 2008, she has been a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute and teaches the only sonic branding course in the nation. Audrey has also been the music supervisor for past 9 Olympic Broadcasts by NBC.

Margaret Mayer is the Managing Vice President, Messaging, Conversational AI & Emerging Technologies at Capital One and has been with the company over 20 years. In her current role, Mayer is well known for her work overseeing Capital One's Eno AI-based bot and Alexa skill, which was the first banking skill on the platform. Earlier in her career, Mayer was a database administrator. She earned an engineering degree from Cornel University and a PhD in industrial engineering from Lehigh University.

Marco Iacono is COO at Viv Labs and a VP of mobile R&D at Samsung. Viv Labs is the Samsung acquisition that gave us Bixby 2.0 that was introduced last summer with the Galaxy Note 9 Launch. Marco was previously the engineering project manager for Siri at Apple for iOS, CarPlay, and Apple Watch. Earlier in his career, Marco worked at PwC and he started off out of school as a Java Engineer at Dulcian. Marco earned a BS in Computer Science from Syracuse University where he is currently a member of the advisory board for the Dept of Electrical Engineering. He is the only person that has served in product leadership for the launch of two of the five leading consumer voice assistants in the market today. Marco discusses voice assistant design, launch, and where we are headed.

Amir Hirsh is founder and CEO of Audioburst. He founded the company in 2014 after a long career in cybersecurity with the idea of transcribing and indexing all audio content to make search and discovery as easy for audio as it is for text. Audioburst currently lists a lot of big names as customers including LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Dentsu, and Hyundai. Before Audioburst, Amir was a founder of Collactive which was acquired by IAI. He was also a founder of Sendoo and Blue Security. Earlier in his career, he was VP of R&D at Riptech which was acquired by Symantec in 2002. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from George Mason University and also studied at Ben Gurion University.

The annual Google I/O developer conference had a lot of focus on Google Assistant as expected, but the company's direction is clearly shifting. In this week's Voicebot Podcast, four Google Action developers offer their initial reactions to the Google I/O keynotes and what they indicate about what Google sees as important and where the product line is headed over the next year. Dominik Meissner of 169 Labs talks about Duplex on the web, the on-device Google Assistant, the rise of Google's focus on privacy, and the new Nest Home branding. The second interview is with Chad Gilhoi, one of the top independent Google Action developers. Chad zeroed in on the focus around Assistant integration with Android apps, the new Nest Home Hub Max, the need for better Chromecast integration, and the new Canvas multimodal development environment. He also commented on Google's lack of focus around monetization and developer success stories with revenue generation. Jochen Emig of ONSEI also pointed out the focus around Android app integration with Google Assistant, the potential conflict between apps and Actions when using voice, the use of facial identification as a feature of the Nest Hub Max smart display, and the privacy emphasis. He also discussed a recent Google Action implementation ONSEI completed for a German retailer that includes product search and the ability to purchase over 35,000 SKUs by voice. Finally, Nick Schwab was intrigued by Google's entry into accessibility features that leverage voice technologies and applies them at a "human level." He also discussed Duplex for the Web, voice integration for search, and Android Automotive. He hopes over the next year to see the integration of Google's many development tools to create a more unified developer experience.

Dave Isbitski became Amazon's first chief evangelist for Alexa in 2014. That's five years, but in smart speaker time, it's an eternity. Dave started out hosting office hours in Alexa Slack, going to Meetups and more recently is most commonly seen speaking at conferences around the world. We caught up at the Alexa Live online conference recording session in Seattle shortly after he finished up recording the keynote. Prior to his role on the Alexa team, Isbitski was the chief evangelist for the Amazon App Store. That was preceded by six years as a technical evangelist at Microsoft and time as a technical manager for Johnson & Johnson. We talk about building a developer community in the early days after the Alexa launch, how voice is changing consumer expectations and what brands should be thinking about in building their voice strategy.

Ron Croen was the founding CEO of Nuance who worked with three researchers at SRI to launch the company in 1994. Nuance went public in 2000 and merged with Scansoft a few years later. Today Nuance's market cap is just under $5 billion and for about a decade the company was THE voice company worldwide. Ron had a front row seat to many formative developments and events in the early days of voice technology. Amazon Echo truly impressed him when it came out in 2014 because it broke many tenets of industry conventional wisdom. He is now a partner at You and Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures where he is looking at investing in voice once again but even is more enthusiastic about virtual humans. Welcome to the longest Voicebot Podcast to date. If you want to learn a lot about the early days of voice technology and what it tells us about where we are today, Ron is a great tour guide.

Voice interaction is becoming a common feature in cars but it is about more than just controlling temperature settings and navigation. Three innovators join Voicebot Podcast this week to share how they expect voice interaction in the car to evolve. John Foster, CEO of Aiqudo, discusses how tasks can be executed by using voice to activate one or more mobile apps while driving. Aiqudo's view is that all of the things you want to do are already reflected on the smartphone and the key is to make all of that accessible hands free while driving. Rachel Battish, vice president of product at Audioburst, outlined how her company is indexing audio content and making it accessible in short "bursts" that can be delivered in a series or in response to a query. Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media discusses how radio and other audio content can maintain their historical role entertaining drivers as we transition from preset buttons to voice requests. The interviews were conducted onsite at Voice of the Car Summit.

Voice assistants in the car pre-date Siri on iPhone by a decade and smart speakers in the home by even longer. The use cases bring obvious benefits because voice allows drivers to execute key activities in the car while keeping their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Recorded live at the first Voice of the Car Summit, Arianne Walker discusses Amazon's Alexa Auto strategy, Adam Emfield reveals what Nuance has learned by bringing voice into the cabins of every major automaker, and Rashmi Rao of Harman describes how the infotainment system is the central hub for voice in the car and is arbitrating user queries before sending them to multiple assistants.