The Voicebot Podcast

Pat Higbie is CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia which delivers voice interactive apps and managed services for media and brands looking to connect with consumers on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana or other platforms. Pat has worked in voice technology for a decade and co-founded XAPP in 2012, well before Amazon Echo launched. The company first worked with mobile audio apps to voice enable their content discovery and ads. Pat says, this is why the company originally built its platform for scale. In 2016, XAPP began working with brands and media companies to build and manage voice apps. Today, the company has hundreds of voice apps under management. Pat talks about what he has learned bringing so many organizations to voice interaction for the first time and what it takes to build a scalable voice platform.

Peter Cahill has been working in voice technology for 15 years. He has a PhD. in Text-to-Speech, was a professor of speech technology at the University of Dublin and more recently founded speech technology platform, Voysis. Voysis raised $8 million in VC funding in February 2017 and has offices in Dublin, Boston and Edinburgh. While Peter expects Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri will have great success in many consumer applications, he founded Voysis to provide businesses with a flexible platform enabling them to own the entire end-to-end customer experience. Every new technology platform shift generates new billion dollar valuation companies. Could Voysis be among this group for voice and AI? Peter discusses the challenges of voice technology, how TTS differs from STT, what Voysis is up to in voice commerce and where the industry is headed. Enjoy.

Jo Jaquinta has been a developer for 20 years and started developing games for Amazon Alexa in 2015. Since that time, he has written two books on voice application development for Alexa and become a leading game developer on both the Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. Jo shares what he has learned about designing games for voice, developing within current constraints, options for monetization and even how the Alexa reward payout structure works today.

Bryan Moffett is COO of National Public Media, a subsidiary of audio content powerhouse NPR. NPR began working with voice interaction on mobile in 2014, was embedded as news in the early days of Alexa but really began to focus on the potential of voice assistants when they served 500k users on Christmas day in 2016. Bryan talks about NPR's strategy and what they learned from the most in-depth ethnographic study and survey about how people use Amazon Echo and Google Home today.

Jess Williams and Oscar Merry started working with Amazon Alexa in 2015 while at Accenture and then left to start their own London-based digital agency dedicated to voice, Opearlo. After working with Unilever and other big brands they passed the reigns to a colleague, founded a new company called Life Bot and joined the Y Combinator Accelerator. Jess and Oscar have learned a lot about building voice apps on Alexa and Google Assistant for brands and consumers and they share their insights with the Voicebot community in this interview.

John Kelvie is a veteran of voice interaction on mobile and an early developer for voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Seeing a lack of sophisticated developer and monitoring tools for voice, John founded Bespoken to make voice applications easier to build, maintain and improve. His efforts have already received an endorsement from both Amazon and Google. John covers his view on voice application development, the state of AI and the likely market trajectory for the industry.

Dan Whaley talks about how Alexa development is coming along in the UK and demonstrates some Alexa skills to point out strengths and weaknesses of voice UX design.

Quentin Delaoutre is a leading Amazon Alexa Developer from France. He is the creator of Jab, the first messaging Alexa skill, the AlexaSkillsStore.com and author of Amazon Alexa Ultimate User Guide. In this interview, Quentin talks about building voice applications, why he chose to focus on messaging and some of the things he's learned along the way.

Lisa Falkson is the Principal Voice UX Architect at self-driving car startup NIO and also serves as an advisor to Witlingo, a voice technology design and development startup. She previously worked at Amazon's famous Lab126 as a Senior Voice User Interface Designer where she helped launch three voice enabled products in 2014, including Amazon Echo. An electrical engineer trained originally at Stanford and later earning an MSEE from UCLA, Lisa started her career as a software developer at Sun Microsystems before working at Nuance Communications for either years. Her background is rare because of her deep experience in voice design. There is a lot to learn from her unique insights. Enjoy!

Just as independent developers helped drive smartphone usage with apps for iOS and Android, they are also key to keeping consumers engaged on smart speakers and other voice platforms. Nick Schwab is one of the earliest developers on both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. His top three skills on Amazon have over 1,000 reviews when most applications struggle to receive five. And, he is sending out over 7TB of streaming data daily to his large user base. Learn more about how developers are viewing the voice platforms and the future of voice applications from a creator's perspective.