The Voicebot Podcast

Omar Tawakol is CEO and co-founder of Voicera which he says is creating a conversations inbox and system of record for meetings. The core solution is automated meeting transcription that also generates meeting notes with a highlights summary. Omar goes into detail about how the Ensemble service applies multiple speech recognition engines to address the meeting transcription challenge before applying AI to extract highlights. He earned a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford and engineering degree from MIT. This week's interview goes deep into enterprise voice applications for productivity and even covers the idea of compounding network effects associated with a combination of a data advantage and AI that continually improves.

Adam Marchick sat down to discuss his journey with Voice Labs and Alpine AI and the recent acquisition by Headspace. He breaks down the three phases of Voice Labs + Alpine (analytics, ad monetization, discovery) and why Headspace wanted to bring the company in house. We also go into Adam's experience in engineering and VC, how his internship at Facebook influences his approach to marketing, and how his previous company, Kahuna, influenced the approach he took wth Voice Labs. Adam earned both Computer Science and MBA degrees at Stanford.

Jeff Adams has spent more than two decades in the voice industry. During that time he worked for well recognized industry names that include Scansoft, Nuance and Amazon. At Nuance, he worked on the famous Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation software. At Amazon, Jeff led the original ASR and NLU teams for Alexa where he is also listed as the author on 21 patents. Just before Alexa's launch, he left Amazon to start Cobalt Speech & Language which helps companies solve the biggest technical challenges in voice technology. Jeff has undergraduate and graduated degrees in Math from Brigham Young, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Oregon.

Nick Schwab founded Invoked apps after building his first three Alexa skills in 2016. Within six months he had more sounds and was streaming 1 TB of data per day. Fifteen months later he has 41 sound skills plus a couple of games on both Alexa and Google Assistant that collectively generate 18 TB of streaming data each day. Invoked Apps also has the distinction of publishing the Alexa skill with the most user reviews, Ambient Sounds: Thunderstorm Sounds. That skill has over 13,700 user reviews at an average rating of 4.9 stars. In the interview, Nick discusses the product strategy behind single invocation skills and aggregation skills and how he has had to take a different approach on Google Assistant. He also discusses his experience in 2017 with Alexa skill cross promotion and advertising and the current Amazon developer rewards program. There is a lot to learn about the state of Alexa skills today and how the system works differently on Amazon and Google. You will definitely learn a lot.

Jess Williams is co-founder of Opearlo, a company that started out building Alexa skills for Unilever and other brands, but switched to building games and productivity skills for consumers in 2017. She goes into the story behind switching to become a product company focused around a single skill called LifeBot, designed to be your personal voice assistant concierge with many features, and then changing again to building multiple single-feature skills. Two years since founding Opearlo, the latest approach is working. The company's Alexa skills are getting strong consumer usage, the founders like the focus on a product business and they are even generating revenue. During our conversation Jess goes into detail on strategies for Alexa skill discovery. She discusses how the company launched the "Guess My Name," skill and the impact different approaches have on driving new consumer usage and capturing Amazon's attention. Yes, she reveals some numbers. This is a can't-miss episode from someone who started in the space in 2015 when Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) was first released and is open to sharing what she and her co-founder learned along the way. Enjoy.

Jan König is co-founder and CEO of Jovo, the maker of an open source, context-first development framework. Context here refers to the device type such as smart speaker, smartphone, television, tablet and the like. The theory is that developers need to have centralized logic that can serve users across numerous devices with different underlying operating systems and across modes such as voice, visual, audio, video and text. Jovo has started with tools to support Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice app developers and expanded into multimodal user experiences. Jan offers an update on what has happened over the past year since he appeared on Voicebot Podcast Ep 13. The interview was conducted on location at Voice Summit 2018.

John Kelvie is CEO and co-founder of Bespoken which provides voice app testing, monitoring and development software. Bespoken has over 1,000 users and apps on its testing platform including Mercedes Benz. John was a guest on Voicebot Podcast Ep 6 (well worth a listen) and the interview took place when the company was less than one year old. Now over two years since starting to develop the Bespoken voice app suite, the company has delivered a broad set of enterprise-class testing automation tools including a continuous testing solution that can be used in production. John goes into detail into why this is important and how Bespoken complements third-party voice UX testing solutions.

Shane Mac co-founded Assist five years ago with Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens. Since then, Assist has focused on enabling the talking internet for brands; first with chat bots, then with voice apps. Mac says the company's work centers around bookings, ordering and online to offline engagement use cases. The projects always involve backend systems integration. Whether it is taking beer orders at a baseball game on iMessage, selling flowers through Google Assistant or booking beauty appointments at Sephora by chatbot, Assist attempts to work on projects that touch the core of its customers' businesses. Mac first appeared on Voicebot Podcast Ep 18 in November 2017. This episode stands on its own, but we recommend you go back and listen to one of the most insightful guests to date to hear the entire back story and vision. We recorded this episode live at Voice Summit AI 2018 to review how things have changed over the past year. Enjoy!

Tom Hebner is the Global Head of Innovation at Nuance Communications. He has been at the company since 1999 by way of acquisition in 2008, so has had a front-row seat to observe the evolution of voice technology in the modern era. He spent most of his early career in voice user experience design before moving into cloud and innovation groups. Tom earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Villanova and Masters in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Princeton. We talk voice industry history, voice UX, Nuance and enterprise voice assistants.

Pulse Labs co-founders Abhishek Suthan (CEO) and Dylan Zwick (CPO) brought their crowdsourced voice app testing service into the first Alexa Accelerator class operated by TechStars in 2017. Since then, they have assembled hundreds of pre-screened voice app testers and provided UX feedback to nearly a hundred voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Along they way, the company raised $2.5 million from venture funds at both Amazon and Google and Jeff Bezos' personal investment fund. Abhishek earned CS and CE degrees from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Emory University. Dylan earned a PhD in Math and Masters degree in data science from the University of Utah along with Masters and undergraduate degrees in statistics and math from Stanford.