The Voicebot Podcast

Oren Jacob is co-founder and CEO of Pullstring. Founded in 2011, Pullstring is maker of Converse, an enterprise SaaS platform for building, deploying and maintaining conversational apps. Oren discusses how his 20-year career making movies at Pixar influences his approach to voice app and multimodal design. He goes into how the company started, how things were different before Amazon Echo, how the kids in his neighborhood were his original focus group and what he learned from working on high profile projects for Mattel, Grand Tour and Sponge Bob.

TRT World is a global news media organization headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. Derrick Fountain oversees TRT World's product and R&D group and has led the launch of three Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps. TRT World has a news-based voice app as you might expect, but Derrick's team has also built two games that reinforce the company's mission around news and its brand. One of them recently won an award from Google. The apps all have high production quality with professional voice recordings and are multi-modal supporting both voice and text. Derrick offers insight into his start in audio publishing in 2004 and move to voice in 2007 and 2017 shift to voice assistants. He also discusses a global view on voice technology and how voice assistants are being used today in the Middle East.

Matt Hartman is a partner at Betaworks, a venture fund and innovation firm. Betaworks has made several investments in voice technology and recently hosted the 12-week Voicecamp Accelerator that helped incubate eight startups in tools and entertainment categories. Matt also has a popular voice technology newsletter called Hearing Voices. In this week's interview, Matt talks about voice technology segments, consumer use cases and investing in the space.

Shane Mac is CEO and co-founder of Assist which provides a voice and chatbot platform for brands looking to engage consumers. The platform works across multiple voice and chat services including Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Shane recounts how he first started in voice four years ago and the lessons learned working with brands ranging from Sephora and Hyatt to Fandango and 1-800-Flowers.

Peter Nann is the speech and automation lead at Salmat and has worked in speech technology since 1993. He started as a software developer and by 2001 was a senior voice user interface architect. His focus today is voice design, analysis and improving existing voice systems. In this week's interview, Peter recounts the evolution of voice user experience over more than 20 years, offers some tips on designing for voice and provides an overview of the voice assistant technology landscape in Australia. He also offers some perspective on Amazon Alexa and the reception of Google Home becoming the first smart speaker available in Australia.

David Watkins is Service Director for Connected Home Devices at research firm Strategy Analytics, and is one of the leading analysts tracking the voice assistant and smart speaker markets. David takes a data-first approach to analyzing adoption of Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, Alibaba Tmall Genie and dozens of other smart speakers under development by software companies, device manufacturers and telcos. He also brings a global perspective covering U.S., Europe and Asian adoption patterns. The conversation touches on a lot of data including forecasts for 2017 and through 2022. David also goes into why adoption patterns in Asia will differ from early results in the U.S. and market share for the leading voice assistant providers.

Hicham Tahiri is the founder and CEO of Smartly.ai. While Hicham started as an embedded systems engineer, he began his job as a voice user interface designer way back in 2006 and has spent most of his career focused on voice technology. He later founded what became Smartly in 2011 to help companies building robots and cars integrate speech recognition and interaction into their solutions. When Amazon Echo was launched along with the Alexa Skills Kit in 2015, Smartly began creating Alexa skills and built one of the first third-party voice app design solutions. Smartly.ai is headquartered in Paris and its software is used by over a thousand developers worldwide. The solution is designed to enable voice app development without the need for technical expertise and as a toolset for skilled developers to build more efficiently.

Brad Abrams is Group Product Manager for Google Assistant. He takes time in this interview to share experiences from the first year of the voice assistant platform. From the launch of Google Assistant on Google Home and smartphones, to the expansion into seven different countries with more on the way, Brad shares some surprises and little known facts about the platform. He also answers questions related to voice SEO, voice commerce, multi-modal development, expansion into new languages and much more. This is a rare look inside Google Assistant, how it works and the decisions driving one of the top two platforms in voice today.

Jan König is CEO of Jovo, a company providing a framework and tools for building robust multi-modal apps that include voice. Along with Alex Swetlow, Jan founded Jovo in 2017, recently graduated from Betaworks Voicecamp accelerator and released the company's first product. Jan discusses how he and Alex came to their idea for Jovo and the premise behind building voice-first apps that are consistent, continuous and complementary across UI surfaces -- yes multi-modal 101. We also talk about Amazon and Google's latest releases and how technology adoption differs between NYC and Berlin. Get the German perspective on voice and AI in this week's interview.

David is a partner and co-founder at NextView Ventures. The firm just raised a new $50 million fund for seed stage investments in the Everyday Economy. In this interview, David Beisel talks about super technologies, innovation waves, how voice and AI will play a role in the things we do every day and three strategies for driving discovery of a new Alexa skill. David previously published a voice computing map that highlighted multiple sectors of voice technology and shares his thoughts on whether he thinks Amazon, Google, Apple or others will ultimately capture the hearts, minds and ears of everyday consumers. This is a must listen for entrepreneurs and executives working in the AI and voice ecosystems today.