The Voicebot Podcast

The podcast discusses the creation of voice interactive games for car entertainment by Drivetime.fm's CEO. Topics include merging gaming with commuting, Zynga's gaming habits strategy, Rocket Games' mobile slots success, in-car gaming innovation, synthetic voices usage, and guidance on accessing Drive Time FM and Voicebot Says Podcast.

Brian Roemmele first started working with voice technology in the 1980's and recently expanded his research efforts. At the Alexa Conference in January 2019, Brian offered an update about his work including a forthcoming book called "The Last Interface," and product concepts named the Intelligence Amplifier and Wisdom Keeper. The Intelligence Amplifier will be a tool that records your life in real-time and instantly enables you to retrieve any information from your life experiences as needed. It will also have agency to anonymously gather information or execute tasks on your behalf. The wisdom keeper will be your manifestation while you are not there and can represent you both in life and afterward. Brian talks about some things that are being done today and others only seen previously in science fiction. It's a provocative conversation with a practical application of AI and voice.

This week's episode has 11 more interviews from the CES 2019 show floor. We have real-time reactions from executives at some of the world's leading companies along with some established players in voice technology. Hear from: Dr. Yoon C. Lee, an SVP at Samsung Electronics America; Lilian Rincon, a Google Assistant product manager; Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory; Dr. John Ostrem, co-founder of AvatarMind; Robert Policano, a Nuance Automotive product manager; Roger Zhang, an executive at Alibaba; Moshe Sheier, vice president of marketing at CEVA; Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop; Erez Lugashi, CEO of Abilisense, and product leaders from both Samsung and LG. Combined with Ep 78, this episode provides the most comprehensive set of interviews related to voice AI, from startup companies to global leaders at CES 2019.

CES 2019 officially kicks off today, but Voicebot already has eight interviews with a select group of voice innovators exhibiting at the conference this year. The Sunday before CES, 150 companies are selected to present their innovations to the media. Bret Kinsella and Ava Mutchler interviewed founders and executives at iFlytek, Woobo, Pillar Learning, Hi-Mirror, Moen, Flo, Mycroft, and Snips. We learn about voice translators, social robots, voice-interactive toys, voice in the bathroom, and independent voice platforms. It's a wide variety of voice software infrastructure and consumer applications. If you want to stay in touch with the story-behind-the-chaos that is CES, listen to this special edition of the Voicebot Podcast.

Paul Cutsinger is responsible for building, supporting, and training the Amazon Alexa developer community. He joined Amazon in 2013, served as Chief Evangelist for the Amazon App Store, and then joined the Alexa team in 2016. His team travels around the world supporting hundreds of conferences, hackathons, and voice meetups in addition to running weekly office hours and training on Twitch. We talk about Alexa circa 2016, how it has changed each year since, and go deeper into discussions around voice SEO, Alexa skill connections (cross-skill integration), monetization and more. Paul previously served as Vice President of Technology for games at The Walt Disney Company, spent 14 years with Microsoft, and earned a mechanical engineering degree from Colorado State University.

Zach Johnson is CEO and co-founder of Xandra, a conversation design studio. Earlier in his career, he was CEO at SPARK Bureau and Atmail. Way back in the 1990's he was with iXL in Boston and Germany during the rapid rise of the web. He is a graduate of the New School and today splits time between Australia and New York. Xandra has worked on some of the highest profile Alexa skills available today including Westworld The Maze, The Sponge Bob Challenge, and Sesame Street.

Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner are co-founders of 169 Labs, a leading voice app development agency in Germany. They discuss Amazon Alexa skill and Google Action adoption by brands and media in Europe, the challenges of language localization, how consumers view voice assistant technology, and similarities between voice today and the mobile app stores a decade ago. The duo founded 169 Labs shortly after winning an Alexa skill hackathon in 2017 and Tim was recently named an Alexa champion.

A lot happened in voice assistant land in 2018. An all-star panel breaks it down for you this week with Ahmed Bouzid, CEO of Witlingo, Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io, and Karen Kaushansky of Robot Futures. We discuss the biggest stories of 2018, break down what Amazon, Google, and Apple did right and wrong this year, whether Samsung Bixby will succeed, and predictions for 2019. We also do a real-time Twitter poll on whether Google Duplex, the rapid expansion of voice assistant language support, Echo Dot record sales, or Samsung Bixby 2.0 was the biggest story of 2018. Join us for a fast-paced and insightful review of what happened and what is to come.

Oren Jacob is CEO and founder of PullString and Greg Hedges is Vice President of Emerging Experiences at RAIN Agency. In this episode, we break down the latest adoption data of voice assistants on and beyond the smart speaker. User adoption of voice assistants is actually higher on smartphones and in cars, we explore how that impacts brands, media, and enterprises while also exploring how consumers use them today. You can download the report at https://voicebot.ai/research and follow along with the discussion or just sit back and listen to two industry experts share how organizations are reacting to the spread of voice on multiple device surfaces.

Stuart Patterson is CEO and co-founder of LifePod Solutions. The mission of the company is to transform how people care for their parents and other elders as they age in place. It is "2-way Alexa for the elderly," and leverages what Patterson calls proactive voice. Prior to LifePod, Stuart was President and COO of Sidekicks which was a mobile app serving autistic children and their families. He also served as CEO of Xtone which enabled apps to add voice interaction. Going further back, Stuart was President of Scansoft which acquired Nuance and before that was CEO of Speechworks for six years before merging it with Scansoft. Stuart has a voice industry pedigree going back more than 20 years. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MBA from Yale.