The Voicebot Podcast

Keyvan Mohajer is co-founder and CEO of Soundhound, known for the app that will tell you in seconds what song is playing. The company is becoming even more famous for inventing the Hound voice assistant that is designed to rival Google Assistant and Alexa, but enable app owners to maintain control of the user experience and data. Keyvan talks about founding SoundHound in 2004 while earning his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, growing the Hound platform to over 60,000 developers and goes into detail about the company's recent $100 million in new funding.

Karen Kaushansky started as a speech technology designer at Nortel in the mid-1990's and moved on to become a voice user interface designer at Nuance. Later she worked at Tellme and in experience design at Microsoft and Jawbone. Karen co-founded a smart clothing company, Sensilk and more recently founded Robot Futures Consulting where she has worked with self-driving car company NIO and toy maker Lego. Karen earned degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and currently works from Basel, Switzerland.

Amazon has added a lot of features to Alexa Skills Kit over the past year. Voicebot asked two of the most experienced Alexa developers to weigh in on some of the biggest feature additions. Octavio Menocal has developed over 70 Alexa skills both personally and with RAIN Agency. Eric Olson is an Alexa Champion who built some of the first popular Alexa skills and has worked closely with the Alexa developer evangelist team. We discuss the intent history API, notifications, location, lists, video play directives, one shot utterances, multi-modal development, duplicate invocation names and more.

Chris Messina is co-founder of the company that makes the personalized virtual assistant Molly. He is a frequent conference speaker and commentator on chatbots and voice assistants and sees Molly as both a tool for individuals and as a vehicle to connect people through a new social assistant model. A former developer experience lead at Uber, developer advocate and UX designer at Google, Chris was also previously a board member of the OpenID and Open Web foundations. Chris is probably best known as the inventor of the hashtag for Twitter. He earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and shares his thoughts with Voicebot Community about chat, voice and the future of assistants.

Vasili Shynkarenka is co-founder and CEO of Storyline, the company dedicated to making it easy for anyone to create an Amazon Alexa skill without coding. Vasili started working with conversational interfaces in 2015 as a co-founder, chatbot UX designer and algorithm developer. He later became CEO of Botcube, a chat based applications development firm located in Belarus. Earlier in his career, he was a web developer focused on CMS for news and blogging. Storyline just emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class, its user base has been growing quickly, and over 500 Alexa skills have been published using the software. One of those Storyline created skills, Kids Court, recently took the top prize in a contest to build children's games for Alexa.

Max Child and James Wilsterman are co-founders of Volley, a company that makes games for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The Volley games Song Quiz and Yes Sire currently hold the number 1 and 2 rankings on Alexa. Volley also recently graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2018 program and has raised over $1 million in seed funding. Max was formerly an iOS developer, journalist and worked for Boston Consulting Group. James was a co-founder of Streak Trivia which held once-a-day trivia tournaments on iPhone and Facebook Messenger. Both Max and James graduated from Harvard and Max proudly lists himself as a Stanford Business School drop out. Volley traces its origins back to 2013 but it wasn't always all about voice games. In the beginning, they were developing games for mobile and innovating around games that could be played solely within mobile notifications. This week's interview covers everything from Volley's founding and the duo's past experience with games to what makes a good voice game and how to capture new users.

Stas Tushinskiy is CEO and co-founder of Instreamatic.ai. The company today delivers audio ads that consumers can interact with by voice on mobile and hopes to do the same on smart speakers when the voice assistant platforms update their advertising policies. Instreamatic was recently named a finalist for the Accelerator Pitch award at South by Southwest. Stas previously founded Unisound which developed audio advertising technology for streaming music services. He also has a background in eCommerce and gaming. He earned bachelor's and masters degrees from the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University in Moscow.

Voicebot, PullString and RAIN collaborated on the Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report 2018. Today's special episode breaks down the findings and extends the discussion to offer additional perspectives. PullString COO Michael Fitzpatrick and Greg Hedges, vice president of emerging experiences for RAIN Agency, join Voicebot's Ava Mutchler and host Bret Kinsella in this week's panel discussion. Topics include: total U.S. user base, appeal for young and elderly consumers, U.S. device market share, use cases, voice commerce, direct-to-consumer opportunities and much more.

Mark Webster is the CEO and Founder of Sayspring. Founded in 2016, Sayspring offers online software that allows anyone to quickly create interactive prototypes for voice applications on Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Mark is a designer by training and experience and earned a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. He worked early in his career for the NBA's entertainment division, has worked with several other digital media broadcast companies including Intercast Networks and spent time as a product director at Groupon. Mark offers many insights about designing for voice and discusses key differences between the leading platforms and how they impact user experience.

Ahmed Bouzid is founder and CEO of Witlingo, a company that helps brands, non-profits and other organizations ranging from The Motley Fool and Berlitz to AARP and a successful Virginia Gubernatorial candidate create voice enabled apps. Ahmed has more than 20 years experience working in speech technology. He worked on the early version of Alexa while at Amazon, was a product leader at Angel.com and even built a natural language voice assistant in the 1990's. He has a Masters Degree in computer science, a PhD from Virginia Tech, is the founder of the Ubiquitous Voice Society association and is a lecturer at Weber State University. In this week's episode, we talk about voice assistant development in the 1990's, the creation of voice interaction authoring tools for non-developers, the idea behind web pages for voice, what it was like working on the Amazon Alexa team and his first two years of work at Witlingo. We even spend some time assessing the leading voice assistant platform strengths and weaknesses and touch on the importance of the Gutenberg parenthesis. It's the longest Voicebot Podcast episode yet, but its packed with history and insight. Enjoy.