The Voicebot Podcast

Nic Newman just completed a comprehensive study for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism about smart speaker adoption titled "The Future of Voice and the Implication for News." The work includes consumer surveys in the U.S. and Europe, interviews with media outlets globally, and in-home consumer observation. Nic is a former journalist and now a media strategist with more than 30 years experience. Over his career, he was a BBC Newshour presenter, Editor, Producer, and reporter for radio, television and online editions. He also served as BBC Head of Product Development and Technology. Over the past decade, Nic has been a Senior Research Fellow at City University of London's department of journalism and a Digital Strategist at Nic Newman Associates where his clients have included the BBC, ITV, Financial Times, and Manchester City. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics. We cover a lot of ground about the evolution of media through the web, mobile, social and voice epochs as well as how smart speakers are changing consumer habits.

Following up on our Podcast with Adam Cheyer (Ep 69), Samsung Bixby's engineering leader, I caught up with some developers and researchers that have worked with Bixby 2.0. We start off with Joe Murphy, founder of Vocalize.ai which is the leading benchmarking company for smart speaker performance. Then, Roger Kibbe, the best-in-show winner of Samsung Bixby Developer Showcase contest, breaks down how Bixby works from a developer perspective. He goes deep into how the Bixby NLU works, the dev environment, and his rationale for supporting the Samsung platform. Pete Haas was also a finalist for Bixby Developer Showcase and offers his perspective on building an eCommerce capsule and how he needed to adjust to the Bixby voodoo. Both Roger and Pete also compare Bixby to Alexa and Google Assistant development environments.

Adam Cheyer is a co-founder of Siri and Viv. He is the technical leader and visionary behind the original Siri on the iPhone 4s and Bixby 2.0 which rolled out this year on Samsung's Galaxy Note 9. I caught up with Adam at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco shortly after he presented an overview of Bixby's new IDE for developers. We go back to the first digital assistant he developed while at Stanford Research Institute in the 1990's and trace a 25-year path culminating this week in Bixby 2.0's official launch. Cheyer is currently a 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. 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 M.S. in computer science from UCLA. He is a true pioneer in the fields of artificial intelligence, voice, and virtual assistants.

Heidi Culbertson began her career in mobile technology solution sales for Sprint, USAT and Incode wireless. Her work in enterprise sales often required her to design solutions for companies adopting mobile for the first time. That led her to focus on user experience design for mobile followed by a move into consulting at AT&T and work as an independent UX consultant. Culbertson was drawn full time into voice in order to help her mother who suffered from macular degeneration. She quickly realized that many elders could benefit from voice assistants and that led to founding Marvee in early 2016. Culbertson discusses voice UX principles and how requirements must be modified when serving older users. She also discusses the Marvee Alexa skill, what her team has learned about elder users and why they are changing the skill significantly to better align with user needs.

This week we have Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer of Publicis. Publicis is one of the three largest marketing agency holding companies worldwide with nearly 80,000 employees spread across more than 20 agencies. It was great to get a CXO perspective on how voice fits into the strategies of brands worldwide and what they should be doing now. We also discuss how different types of agencies work and how voice looks in comparison to previous tech and marketing trends brought on by the web, mobile and social. Tobaccowala has previously served as President of Starcom and Chair of Digitas and Razorfish. He started his career at Leo Burnett. Tobaccowala earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and economics from the University of Mumbai. This week is about the intersection of voice, marketing & brands.

Voicebot recently published the Voice UX Best Practices eBook. It is a 45-page masterclass in Voice UX that includes over 100 tips and recommendations from 17 industry experts gathered through dozens of hours of interviews. In this week's interview, I play audio clip highlights from some earlier podcasts and Emerson Sklar from Applause and I discuss the expert commentary and where it fits into the eBook. Featured experts include Ahmed Bouzid (Witlingo), Lisa Falkson (Amazon), Karen Kaushansky (Robot Future), Jan König (Jovo), Shane Mac (Assist), Tim McElreath (Discovery Communications), Cathy Pearl (Google & Author, Designing Voice User Interfaces), Mark Webster (Sayspring / Adobe). You can download the full eBook at voicebot.ai/reports.

Bill Cava is the chief product officer and co-founder of Orbita, a voice technology company focused on healthcare. Orbita has worked with hospitals, senior care facilities, pharmaceuticals and companies in other industry segments to implement voice features into their patient / resident interactions and internal business processes. We discuss the triple aim objectives of healthcare providers and how the current delivery model frustrates those goals, but that voice offers some new opportunities to improve patient experience, efficiency and potentially clinical outcomes. We also go into HIPPA regulations and how those regulations constrain the use of Alexa and Google Assistant in healthcare today. Bill earned computer science degrees from UMass and WPI.

Voicebot recently traveled to Seattle to meet with some of the company founders in the 2018 cohort of the Alexa Accelerator Powered by Techstars. I also had the opportunity to speak with the Alexa Accelerator's managing director, Aviel Ginzburg (3:54) about how the organization recruits new companies and how things have changed between year 1 and year 2. The three company CEO and founders interviewed include Milkana Brace (18:39) of Jargon, James Rhodes (28:30) of Helix AI and Michele Meyer (39:53) of Presence AI. This week's episode offers a glimpse into the future of the voice industry by telling the stories of three entrepreneurs helping drive the change.

Doug Schumacher is likely known to Voicebot listeners as either the host of the VoiceMarketing Podcast or creator of the satirical Homie & Lexy Podcast. He is the founder of Arrovox, a digital creative firm with a speciality that includes voice and marketing. During his career he has worked with clients ranging from Sony Pictures and EA Games to Pepsi and Mattel. Doug started his career as a writer at DDB Needham, TBWA/Chiat/Day and BBDO. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. We discuss his early career learning the Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA) framework, how to write ad copy and his work in radio, digital and social media advertising. It's Advertising Week and what better time to talk about voice marketing.

Amazon held their now annual Alexa hardware event this past week in Seattle. Voicebot was onsite for demonstrations of 12 new Alexa products and 70 other announcements. Voicebot Podcast interviewed Jefferson Graham (USA Today), Nico Jurran (C'T Magazin in Germany), and Jeffrey Dastin (Reuters) to capture both the consumer (U.S. and Germany) and business perspectives (Reuters). If you want to hear from four people that were onsite, saw the demonstrations, and tried the devices first-hand, don't miss this episode.