The Voicebot Podcast

Matt Ware and Lachlan Pottenger of FIRST Digital in Australia join Ava Mutchler and Bret Kinsella to discuss the results of the 2019 Australia Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report. The adoption rate is fast, Google Home dominates, and smart speaker users employ the devices with more frequency than their American peers. The Australia experience is instructive for how smart speakers and voice assistants are seeing adoption in countries that have come online after the U.S. We talk use cases, differences with the U.S., and what consumers really care about.

Steven Arkonovich is a professor of philosophy at Reed College by day and a leading Alexa skill developer by night. He began developing Alexa skills in 2015 before the ASK SDK was released and is best known for having the top-rated Alexa skill for weather. Big Sky has over 2,500 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. That puts Big Sky in the top 20 for skill reviews overall and number one in the weather category. Number 2 is Alexa's native weather skill with about one-ninth the reviews and 2-star rating. An extraordinary element of Steve's story is that he had never done any software programming before starting with Alexa and he still developed some of the more complex skills on the platform. Steve earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Berkeley and an undergraduate degree from UCLA.

Tom Livne is the CEO and co-founder of Verbit.ai. The company provides an AI-driven transcription service for the legal and academic markets that guarantees 99.9% accuracy through a combination of speech-to-text automated speech recognition and human editors. Verbit recently raised $23 million less than one year after raising a seed round of $11 million on the strength of 400% growth. Previously, Tom was co-founder and President of AppInsight. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Technion, and earned a law degree from IDC Herzliya.

This episode is all about US smart speaker adoption data and trends and what it tells us about the future of voice assistant use worldwide. Jeff McMahon (CEO Voicify), Jason Fields (Chief Strategy Officer Voicify), and Ava Mutchler (Voicebot) join host Bret Kinsella discussing data from the recent 2019 U.S. Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report. Topics include the smart speaker rate of adoption, killer app use cases, device market share, changes from 2018, and voice app discovery challenges and solutions.

Mark Lippett joined XMOS in 2006 as VP of Engineering and was later promoted to COO and then CEO about three years ago. XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company with a particular emphasis on IP and products for far-field voice recognition. The company claims to be the first Alexa Voice Service certified solution for linear mic arrays and is used in devices ranging from smart speakers Orange Djingo and Deutsche Telekom Magenta to the Freebox Delta streaming media player. Before XMOS, Mark was CTO and co-founder of silicon IP and embedded software provider Ignios. Earlier in his career, he was a network systems engineer at Texas Instruments. Mark earned an MBA from Henley Management College and a Masters in Engineering for Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Surrey.

Vijay Balasubramaniyan co-founded Pindrop Security in 2011 after completing his PhD and presenting his research about verifying identity based on sounds other than voices in telephone calls. He is the current CEO. The company uses voice biometrics to detect phone-based fraud and notably raised a $90 million funding round in December to expand into Europe and to start securing smart speakers and other voice-activated devices. Prior to founding Pindrop, Vijay was a software engineer at IBM, Google, Siemens, and Intel. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an engineering and computer science degree from R.V. College of Engineering.

Matt Ware is Group Operating Director at Agencies 3Di, First, and TPN, and Lachlan Pottenger is Creative Director at First, a leading digital agency in Australia and the country's top developer of voice apps. Matt and Lachlan talk about a Google Action for Kmart that recommends gifts by type and price and integrates with the retailer's inventory management system to tell shoppers product availability by store location. It has a user return rate of over 30% and 60% of voice sessions include a screen. This is a real-world voice shopping use case that is succeeding today. The interview was recorded on site at the Business of Bots conference in San Francisco 2019.

Amy Stapleton is CEO and founder of Tellables which works with authors to develop interactive story games designed to be played through voice assistants and social robots. Before founding Tellables, Amy was an analyst at Opus Research where she focused on intelligent assistants and coined the term meta assistant. Earlier, she worked in the technology services group at NASA for 14 years and was also a product manager at SAP. Amy earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Germanic Languages and Literature and holds degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Greensboro.

Ben Fisher is CEO and founder of Magic and Co, a voice consultancy that helps brands and enterprises implement voice assistant technologies. Previously Ben served as Chief Technology Officer of Doable Innovation and Waywire Networks. He began his career as a software engineer at Comcast and has a degree in philosophy and economics from Washington University in St. Louis. We talk voice apps, brands, discovery, and how voice assistants are changing marketing at places like Chobani, Bic, and the music industry.

Voice assistant use in the car is 60% higher than smart speakers on a monthly basis, but it doesn't get as much attention. There are more users and the use cases are different. The In-Car Voice Assistant Adoption Report sheds light on these differences. Bradley Metrock from VoiceFirst.fm and Niko Vuori of Drivetime.fm collaborated with Voicebot on the research and we discuss the findings along with my colleague Ava Mutchler. We break down the data and trends that will bring new focus to the car in 2019.