The Voicebot Podcast

Rand Hindi is co-founder and CEO of Snips.ai. He is the former CEO of Hinran, a web development agency and a co-founder of PlanetUltra, the first social network in France. Immediately prior to founding Snips, Rand was a freelance Data Scientist focused on Machine Learning and Algorithmic trading. He also is into quantified self and did an AI-driven diet experiment that used machine learning to gain 80 pounds and then lose it again. Today, Snips is building an independent voice assistant designed for privacy with no data sharing to the cloud. It is also about to become the first voice AI company to launch an ICO. Mr. Hindi earned a PhD in Bioinformatics at the University College London. Don't miss this episode.

This special episode is dedicated to voice commerce trends and data. In particular we discuss the results of the recently published Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report. Joining the panel are Brian Colcord and Ryan MacInnis from Voysis and my colleague Ava Mutchler from Voicebot.ai. Brian is VP of Design at Voysis, was previously a UX and design executive at LogMeIn and earned an MFA from the University of Hartford. Ryan is Marketing Director at Voysis and previously worked at Twitter, Acquia and the Boston Globe. Learn about how many people have shopped using voice, what they bought, what device they used and what they think about it all. Also, download the report and follow along if you can.

Adva Levin is founder of Pretzel Labs, a Tel Aviv-based company that creates voice-first games that children can play through Amazon Echo and soon Google Home. The company came to prominence earlier this year as the Grand Prize winner of Amazon's first Kids Skills Competition where developers competed for cash prizes for the best Alexa skill designed for children. Previously, Adva worked in product and content roles at a number of startups and has also done literary translation and screenwriting. Adva earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economics from Tel Aviv University.

Joshua Montgomery founded Mycroft AI in early 2015 and since that time has done two successful Kickstarter campaigns, graduated from both Tech Stars and 500 Startups accelerators, raised $3 million in equity capital and delivered the world's first open source voice assistant. And, there is the new subsidiary that has a blockchain solution called Mykrosystem. Josh discusses the importance of independent voice assistants for both consumers and enterprises. He also offers insight on his latest fundraising efforts: an online public offering and a potential initial coin offering (ICO). He has served as a commissioned officer in the Air National Guard since 2009 and graduated from the University of Kansas with an Aerospace Engineering degree.

This week's episode focuses on voice AI events, products and news from the first half of 2018. We discuss Apple's announcements from WWDC and whether it was a big deal or a snoozer, the shift in smart speaker market share to Google, the impact of Google Duplex, what Amazon has done and should be doing and more. This week's guests are Tobias Goebel of Aspect Software, Pat Higbie of XAPPmedia, Chris Messina a developer and product guru best known for inventing the hashtag and Voicebot's Ava Mutchler and Bret Kinsella. We don't just talk about what has happened, we go deep into what it all means. Not to be missed.

Melissa and Matthew Hammersley co-founded Novel Effect in 2015 to use voice recognition combined with sound effects to enhance story time for parents and children. Since that time they have appeared on Shark Tank, completed the first edition of the Alexa Accelerator, closed a $3 million funding round, launched an iOS app, closed deals with major publishers and expanded their application set beyond stories to other use cases. Melissa is the former owner of Figure One Design and is now Chief Design Officer at Novel Effect while Matthew is a former engineer and patent attorney and is currently CEO.

Noelle LaCharite recently moved to Microsoft Cognitive Services after many years at Amazon including a role leading a machine learning team as a senior architect for Alexa. We sat down shortly after the annual Microsoft BUILD conference where the Cognitive Services group announced several new features and the Cortana team demonstrated integration with Alexa. In this week's interview, we cover the recent Microsoft news and its impact for developers building for Alexa and Google Assistant, how Noelle landed in AI and voice, what it takes to build a new language model and much more. Noelle also has experience working at Pivotal, VMWare, and IBM and earned a degree in Computer Science and Business Administration from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Today's guest is an expert in traditional SEO from the web and mobile and has done some of the most interesting research to date on voice SEO. Eric Enge founded Stone Temple in 2002 and the agency has won awards ranging from Best SEO Agency of the Year to Search Marketer of the Year. He is co-author of the popular book The Art of SEO, has served as a columnist in many leading publications, and co-authored an academic research paper published by the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. More important to our listeners, he has conducted a 5,000 query test of the leading voice assistants available today, two years in-a-row. We dissect the results and discuss how voice SEO differs from traditional web and mobile search. Eric earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Masters in Computer Science from UMass Amherst.

This week's episode is all about Google Assistant. Experienced Google Assistant developers Jochen Emig, CTO of Onsei, and Michael Myers, Chief Product Officer of XAPPmedia, discuss the most important features added to the platform over the past year and react to the new announcements from Google I/O. We talk Action Links, Monetization, Continued Conversation, Dialogflow, Google Duplex and much more. They even weigh in on differences from Alexa. Don't miss this episode. A lot of depth here from people on the front lines. Onsei and XAPPmedia work with some of the biggest brands, media and transportation companies in the world. Jochen and Michael share what they have learned along the way.

John Foster is CEO of Aiqudo, a company he cofounded in March 2017. Aiqudo was developed to help people do more things, more quickly. It is a virtual assistant designed for mobile devices and voice enables apps by making their actions accessible through simple voice commands. The company recently announced a partnership with Motorola where Aiqudo now serves as the brains behind the Hello Moto assistant. John is the former CEO of mobile search company Quixey, CEO of DHI and President of Zed. He was an executive at Real Networks and Nextlink Communications and started his career as a tax consultant at PwC. John studied as a undergrad at UC Berkeley and earned an MBA from Stanford.