The Voicebot Podcast

Mark Beccue is principal analyst at market research firm Tractica and recently published a report revealing that the virtual digital assistant software market is nearly $1 billion today and will grow to over $7.7 billion in 2025. The forecast is a bottom-up analysis of hundreds of virtual assistant use cases and we talk about which segments will generate the most software revenue. Mark also goes into detail on Tractica's broader coverage of the AI market as well as chatbots and voice assistants. He has more than 10 years of experience as an analyst, two decades in tech industries and is a graduate of the University of Florida. We take a deep dive into market numbers, how big and fast different segments will grow and why user adoption is so much faster than everyone expected.

Cathy Pearl is best known as the author of Designing Voice User Interfaces published by O'Reilly Media. She is currently Vice President of User Experience at Sensely, worked previously at Nuance, was on the Ford Sync team and holds degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science. Cathy even worked at NASA early in her career where she designed user controls that reduced cognitive load for pilots. She has a lot of hands-on voice design experience, is viewed as an authority in the field and has some insights on using avatars and multiple input methods to complement voice interfaces.

Tobias Goebel is Senior Director, Emerging Technologies for Aspect Software. He has a Masters Degree in Computational Linguistics and has studied at both the University of Bonn and University of Edinburgh. Tobias also has 15 years experience working in voice technology, first as a developer, then as a designer and more recently as a strategist and marketer. Aspect has a big focus on customer service and contact center automation. Chat and voice are now a rapidly growing part of that work, but these technologies are also taking Aspect customers into conversational marketing and direct outreach to new customers.

Tim McElreath is Director of Engineering, Mobile and Emerging Platforms at Scripps which among other things owns Food Network and HGTV. Food Network not only has one of the best voice-first Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps, but also represents one of the finest multi-modal deployments that takes advantage of the Amazon Echo Show's screen to display Food Networks' extensive video library. Tim holds a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a developer for much of his career.

Steven Hansen is the CTO of RAIN Agency. RAIN is well known for its more than 30 Alexa skills launched for high profile brands ranging from Tide, Hellmans and Campbell's Soup to Sesame Street and the big budget World War II movie Dunkirk. The company learned something new in each deployment and Steven shares some of the wisdom he and his colleagues have accumulated. He also talks about the company's Reverb app which enables hundreds of thousands of users to add Alexa to their mobile devices and browsers. Steven has a degree in Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University and has been an executive at RAIN since 2011.

Voice assistants and chatbots have ushered in a new UI and interaction model for consumers. Conversational interactions are very different from the structured interfaces we built previously for web and mobile. The analytics and type of data make this clear according to Arte Merritt, CEO of Dashbot.io. Dashbot has analyzed over 22 billion conversational messages from thousands of chatbots and voice apps so the observations are rooted in data. In addition, Merritt has a long history of analytics, first on the web and then on mobile. His mobile analytics company, Motally, was acquired by Nokia in 2010 when that company was still a mobile juggernaut. In this week's podcast interview, Arte talks about what he has learned from conversational analytics, how chatbots differ from voice and how all of this is much different than mobile.

The consumer electronics show (CES) is visited annually by 180 thousand people and many of the big names in tech have a large presence. CES 2017 was largely regarded as a triumph for Amazon Alexa and was instrumental in raising awareness about voice assistants and how they will fit into the future lives of everyday consumers. It is fair to say that CES 2018 put voice technology on display in an even bigger way with Amazon joined by Google, Samsung, Sony, LG, Toyota, Hyundai and just about every electronics and automotive supplier that attended. This week's podcast is four people who were there discussing what they saw and what it means.

Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory. He founded the company in 1994 to enable people to communicate with consumer electronics the way we do with each other. Sensory builds software and hardware products for voice recognition, biometric identification and more. Voice is the biggest part of Sensory's portfolio and Todd has over a dozen patents in speech technology. Sensory was pioneering the use of neural networks in the 1990's and works today with companies ranging from AT&T and Huawei to Garmin and Waze. With CES 2018 going on this week and voice already proving to be a big theme, it is a great time to get Todd's perspective about Sensory's evolution along with voice technology innovation over the past 20 years.

Owen Brown is co-founder and CTO of Starbutter AI which works at the intersection of virtual assistants and financial products. Starbutter is a leading developer on both Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger. The company's current conversational apps help consumers choose financial products with the best features. Starbutter's Credit Card Helper won awards in four categories of the 2017 Actions on Google Developer Challenge and was the largest prize money winner. Learn about choosing the right solution segment with a clear path to monetization, why Starbutter believes Google and Facebook will win in voice (and Amazon will not), and how important a clear value proposition is to voice app discovery.

A lot happened in 2017 related to voice assistants. Voice app growth, rapid consumer adoption, monetization, smart speakers vs voice assistants on smartphones, the YouTube kerfuffle, the Google Home Mini recording fiasco, will.i.am raising over $100 million and much more. We even conclude the episode with predictions for 2018. I am joined by three industry experts: Adam Marchick CEO of VoiceLabs, Nick Schwab Founder of Invoked Apps, Ava Mutchler Associate Editor of Voicebot.ai. Great conversation that takes a look back and a look ahead. Not to be missed.