The Voicebot Podcast

Dag Kittlaus is the CEO and co-founder of Riva Health, a company that has set out to revolutionize how patients manage hypertension and heart disease. We discuss the innovation behind Riva, which turns a smartphone into a health management assistant that collects data and connects patients with a proactive care team. Hearing Dag talk, you can see how this might extend into traditional assistant functionality for managing chronic heart conditions. He breaks down the Riva journey thus far and we go back into his history as a co-founder of Siri (acquired by Apple) and Viv Labs (acquired by Samsung) and what he learned along the way about assistants, technology, and how users interact with novel solutions.  We also go into depth on the rise of generative AI and ChatGPT. From a ChatGPT perspective, we spent considerable time discussing the new Plugins model to integrate third-party services. Kittlaus was doing this for the Siri app 15 years ago before the Apple acquisition. He did it again with Viv Labs and Samsung's Bixby assistant and knows the challenges of creating a plugin ecosystem. His observation is that the problems are largely the same and OpenAI is in for a rude awakening. I am sure you will enjoy this wide-ranging discussion about innovation, technology adoption, and overcoming barriers to growth with someone that has been influential in shaping our views, experiences, and assumptions about intelligent assistants of all kinds.  

We have a breakdown of the week's top generative AI news stories and what they mean for the industry.  Today's hosts are Bret Kinsella, Voicebot.ai's Eric Schwartz, and industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang. The top stories just this week in a generative AI galaxy that is very, very near include: Unleashing a Synthetic Force Wes Anderson’s Star Wars: In a galaxy not so far away, director Caleb Ward unleashed a one-minute cinematic masterpiece that sent millions of Twitter and YouTube users into a frenzy, dividing the fandom with the power of ironic humor. Aided by the formidable force of AI allies, Midjourney and ChatGPT, our hero Ward swiftly crafted this viral sensation destined to echo through the corridors of cyberspace. Augie Shoots for the Stars: In a realm where time is of the essence, an industry analyst harnesses the power of the enigmatic Augie to forge a captivating tale in a mere 15 minutes. This alliance breathes life into the epic saga of a brave girl's conquest of the big city, forging a triumphant path through adversity and ultimately, success. Stable Expansion to the Outer Rim The Rise of the Models: In a galaxy where AI reigns supreme, Stability AI unveils two powerful allies: Deep Floyd IF, a text-to-image wizard skilled in rendering text with unparalleled accuracy, and Stable Vicuna, an open-source chatbot prodigy trained through the ancient art of reinforced learning from human feedback. Cohere Looks for Clear Trade Lanes Star Words. The Text Awakens: In a sector riddled with fierce competition, Cohere's valuation soars to an impressive $2 billion amidst a cosmic $250 million funding round. As they forge their unique path among the stars, Cohere's unwavering focus on text-based LLMs and business-oriented applications sets them apart from the likes of OpenAI and Stability AI, giving them a chance to become the galaxy's leading alternative LLM option. The Enterprise Strikes Back Rise of the Generative Alliance: In a bold move to conquer the cosmos of generative AI, business services titan PwC prepares to invest a staggering $1 billion, joining forces with Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service to revolutionize their business practice and usher in a new era of AI-driven solutions. Samsung Travels to the Galaxy of Corporate Caution: The tech giant Samsung bans the use of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools for work purposes, citing security risks while developing its own AI solutions in an ever-evolving battle for productivity and privacy. Disruption in the Workforce The Rise of AI Denial: In a galaxy not so far away, 62% of Earthlings foresee a great disturbance in the workforce due to the rise of artificial intelligence, yet mysteriously, only 28% sense the impact on their own fates. This perplexing phenomenon discovered by Pew Research, known as "AI Denial Syndrome," baffles minds across the cosmos. Rise of the Clones Alternate Reality: In the midst of an interstellar digital revolution, Tencent unveils a service for Earthlings to create their own deepfake "digital human" avatars for a mere $145, while rivals such as Synthesia charge a heftier fee and D-ID offers this for just a few credits. With this new power, social media influencers, small business owners, and professionals from all corners of the galaxy can create their own clone armies. A New Force Awakens: In a galaxy where TikTok rules the social media universe, the platform now tests its generative AI prowess, allowing users to create synthetic avatars from a mere handful of photos. These digital doppelgängers may soon populate the TikTok-verse, transforming the way all living things express themselves in the cosmic dance of creativity. The Chatbot Wars A New Life of Pi: A new droid has joined the cosmic conversational realm – Pi, short for Personal Intelligence, a creation of Inflection AI. This emotionally intelligent chatbot, infused with empathy and compassion, aims to transform the way we interact with artificial entities, but not all is as it seems. Bing Spreads Access to the AI Force: As the cosmic winds of innovation continue to blow, Microsoft's Bing AI Chat emerges from the shadows of its waitlist, unveiling its newfound powers of visual search and third-party plug-in integration. The galaxy awaits as these advancements promise to reshape the way intergalactic explorers seek knowledge and wield artificial intelligence. Interstellar Plugins and the UX Chronicles - In a galaxy not so far away, ChatGPT unveils 22 mighty plugins, bestowing users with the power of multimodal displays and real-time data. Yet, in this epic tale, our heroes grapple with the dark side of UX limitations as multiple plugins clash and "Incognito" mode remains elusive. This episode was originally broadcast live on YouTube. If you prefer watching so you can see the videos and other visuals, go to Voicebot's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/@voicebotai. You can find the videos in the Synthetic Media and News sections or in the Live tab. While you are there, we'd appreciate if you gave us a Like and Subscribe. 

Lee Mallon is a CTO, developer, and technical advisor for AI and complex software projects. He created a hotel brand and brochure with his daughter using generative AI in just 7 hours. That project inspired him to see how quickly he could recreate a Trip Advisor for family travel activities website using generative AI. It took him two days and cost $53 to publish a website with over 2k activities, 2.6k images, and nearly 250k words. Learn how Lee did this, some tips, and what he sees next for automating digital experiences.

Mobile World Congress 2023 had a lot of AI solutions on display. D-ID's Yaniv Levy talked about a new streaming API for its virtual human solution paving the way for real-time and dynamic interactive digital people.  Don't miss the second segment with SK Telecom's Youngsup Shin. It is about A., (that's pronounced A [dot]), a virtual assistant that is also a personal companion. A. has 1 million users in its beta period, is based on a large language model (LLM), and has some features similar to ChatGPT.  MyManu is a new hearables headset connected to the 4G cellular network so you can access the internet without your smartphone. It is coming to market later this year and company founder Danny Manu offers us a sneak peek.  We finish up with Patrick Esslinger, the co-founder of VUI Agency. He shares what his team has learned about voice assistant experience design and how those solutions are evolving. 6:03 - D-ID streaming virtual humans 20:10 - SK Telecom on A. virtual companion 34:15 - MyManu about Titan, a new hearables solution 47:10 - VUI Agency on voice assistant experience design

The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 27, 2023, is here. Another week of breaking news has piled up, and we have a breakdown of the top stories and what they mean for the industry. The developments include news from ChatGPT, HuggingFace, Google, Nvidia, Sensory, Hour One, D-ID, deepfake musicians, and more. Your hosts today are Bret Kinsella and Voicebot.ai's Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: ChatGPT En Fuego Plugging in a new vision: Greg Brockman from OpenAI demonstrated some new ChatGPT plugin features; several are jaw-dropping. The “super app” virtual assistant we were promised: Brockman’s demo and the discussion about the product philosophy offer an insight into where ChatGPT is headed. Move over, Alexa. Get out of the way, Siri. ChatGPT may be the virtual assistant we have always wanted. ChatGPT is anything but incognito: While everything ChatGPT seems to play out in the public eye, OpenAI recognized that not every user wanted every one of their chat conversations saved in perpetuity and used for future model training. Incognito (i.e., private chatting) is now available, and a “business mode” is coming soon. HuggingChat Embraces Open Source Open source competition for ChatGPT: Hugging Face stepped up and provided a ChatGPT alternative built on open source models and data. It’s a smaller AI model than ChatGPT and is pretty good. Deepfake Entertainment Drake, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, and Rihanna go viral: Viral hits from big stars are common. Deepfake viral hits mimicking the voice, style, and likeness of big stars may also become common. ghostwrider777 strikes again! Joe Rogan comments run deep: New deepfakes mimicking Joe Rogan’s podcast have the comedian and commentator talking about a “slippery” slope. Grimes jumps on board: The musical artist says she will split royalties 50/50 with anyone deepfaking her voice. She has no label and no binding legal constraints giving her more flexibility than most musicians. More Virtual Human Expansion Prompt-to-video: Hour One introduced a new text-to-video solution that enables full video generation for presentations from a single prompt. Canva gets digital people: D-ID introduced a new Canva app that enables you to add generative videos to any project. Chatbots are suddenly popular: Character AI landed $150M in funding at an obscene valuation. Virtual Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and 2.7 million other chatting avatars with personalities have driven 100M user visits in just two months. Google Ups Generative Game Bard learns to code: Google is slowly catching up with the generative AI leaders. It’s ChatGPT competitor—or, is it a Bing Chat competitor—can now code. This is not a true competitor to GitHub Copilot yet. Sec-PaLM gets into security: Google also rolled out a new cybersecurity solution with the parsimonious name of Google Cloud Security AI Workbench. It is based on a fine-tuned version of the PaLM large language model (LLM). Nvidia and Sensory Plug Market Gaps ChatGPT gets an edge: Sensory rolled out a new hybrid on-device and cloud solution that can enable the use of ChatGPT and similar services on devices. Nvidia on rails: NeMo, Nvidia’s LLM, now has a new feature for adding guardrails to other LLMs to align model outputs with companies’ safety and security requirements. NeMo Guardrails is open source and designed to work with any LLM.

The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 20, 2023, was recorded live at the Model Mania conference, which focused on enterprise generative AI solutions. News this week has more on Elon Musk and some surprising news from Stability AI. We also talk about a deepfake of Drake and The Weeknd that went viral, Adobe Firefly, Atlassian, ChatGPT in government legal actions, Universal Music lawsuits, and more. Bret Kinsella hosted this week with his Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: StableLM and Stable Diffusion XL Big Data LLM: Stability AI introduced a new large language model trained on 1.5 trillion data tokens. It’s open-source and comes in a variety of model parameter sizes. Stable Diffusion for the Enterprise: The new XL model from Stability AI offers better photorealism, more coherent text, and is positioned for enterprise use. Oh, and the company’s valuation may have risen from $1B to $4B in less than six months. Adobe Firefly for Video Generative AI for designers and video makers: Adobe Firefly will make it easier for designers to incorporate generative AI into their workflow. The new services for video production will take that to a new level in Premiere and After Effects. Atlassian Intelligence In-Context Search and Answers: The creator of Jira, Confluence, and Trello has added generative AI features for summarization, text generation, and question-answering from your productivity software data. Elon Musk and X.ai What is Elon up to now: Musk created a new company in Nevada last month called X.ai. He says he wants to create a third option beyond OpenAI and Google offerings. Justice Dept Mentions ChatGPT Name recognition on another level: The U.S. Justice Department’s suit against Google for alleged search monopolization said ChatGPT might have come sooner if not for the company’s stranglehold on the market. The Weeknd and Drake Deepfake Goes Viral Viral Music duo: 10M TikTok views and 600k Spotify streams later, a popular deepfake of a The Weeknd and Drake called “Heart on My Sleeve” was taken down due to a request from one of the music labels.

The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 13, 2023, included some breaking news on Amazon Bedrock, the new service competing directly with OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure AI services. We also discussed Twitter’s generative AI ambitions, HuggingGPT, a positive generative AI launch from MailChimp and a lackluster implementation by Expedia, OpenAI’s bug bounty, the Italy ChatGPT saga, a deepfake of Charles Barkley, Alibab’s everything AI bot, and a bit more. Bret Kinsella (that’s me) hosted again this week with my Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: Amazon Takes on OpenAI & Microsoft A multivendor Bedrock approach: Amazon Bedrock now offers easy access to many generative AI models, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Titan. Copilot gets a competitor: Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, a text-to-code generator, is now general availability and free. GitHub Copilot may have a market share lead with 400,000 paying subscribers, but free is a good way to accumulate users. Elon Musk Goes Shopping Twitter and Generative AI: Elon Musk has reportedly purchased 10,000 GPUs after he was out recruiting some well-known AI researchers. So, why did he want OpenAI and others to pause their AI research? We’ll see. Musk may want Twitter to be an “everything app,” and generative AI would be a key element. Or, he may just want advertisers to have a useful feature. HuggingGPT and Multi-Model Systems Microsoft’s latest take on hybrid AI: Microsoft researchers released a paper and a GitHub repository with a new multi-model LLM controller (orchestrator) that can govern access to a variety of AI models for a single interface called HuggingGPT. We will see more of these multi-model services. MailChimp Gets AI Copywriter Building on the core product: MailChimp added AI writing capabilities via an OpenAI integration. It looks like a clean, on-point generative AI feature. There is no extra cost for the feature right now, but at what point will the companies start passing along the model inference costs to users? Expedia Misses the Plot Generating misperception: Expedia also announced some new generative AI features, but it actually only enables you to learn more about hotels and activities. You can’t actually book a flight or hotel even though the press release language was cleverly written to suggest there is more there than travel review search. Speaking of search, the new GPT-4-powered Bing not only does a better job of trip planning and research, but it also enables you to book a flight and hotel. Alibaba Goes for Everything A generative cornucopia: Alibaba announced its new generative AI solution. The ChatGPT competitor is called Tongyi Qianwen. It is integrated into the Tmall Genie assistant (i.e., Alibaba’s voice assistant), takes meeting notes, writes emails, and creates business documents. It can also help you shop and the company says it supports both Chinese and English. OpenAI Bug$ Out Crowdsourcing security vulnerabilities: OpenAI launched a new Bug Bounty program which will pay out between $200 - $20,000 to developers that find “vulnerabilities, bugs, or security flaws.” This follows OpenAI’s highly publicized security vulnerability and subsequent investigations by privacy regulators in Italy and Canada. FanDuel Goes Deep A young Charles Barkley pitches sports gambling: FanDuel has a new commercial that includes a real-life Charles Barkley and a deepfake of his younger self. Deepfakes are becoming mainstream. Or, maybe they already are. The show was originally broadcast live on YouTube and LinkedIn, and we also added it to the Voicebot Podcast for your convenience. You can see the video here on YouTube. 

Nico Perony is the director of AI research at the game development platform Unity. He was a co-founder and CTO of OTO, which was acquired by Unity in 2021. OTO was a pioneer in emotional intelligence for conversation data. It was known for "Enabling emotional intelligence everywhere, so human and artificial intelligence can interact with awareness and empathy." Perony led the integration of OTO technology into the Unity platform and, more recently, has focused on new conversation AI features and generative AI tooling for game developers. He previously was the founder of Slow Motion Projects and an engineer at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. Perony has a PhD in complex systems and a Master's degree in electrical engineering. 

The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 6, 2023, focused on regulators and OpenAI, ChatGPT’s popularity compared to the iPhone, deepfake disclosure, authentication and ownership, monetizing those generative AI models, what’s Meta doing, and more. Bret Kinsella (that’s me) hosts this week with guests Nina Schick, the author of the 2020 book Deepfakes, and Eric Schwartz, head writer at Voicebot.ai. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: ChatGPT Gets Banned A time-out chair for OpenAI and some unfortunate users: Italy took action. Canada opened an investigation. France received complaints. Germany and Ireland indicated they’d like to get involved. Regulators have OpenAI in their sights. How will it go down? ChatGPT vs. Alexa vs. iPhone Compared to what?: ChatGPT is a phenomenon, but how does it stack up to the hype of earlier products? We compare ChatGPT to some notable break-out hits. Deepfake Solutions Provenance in the unreal valley: It’s a deepfake, but you want to disclose its synthetic origins. You also want to show its history and ownership. How about a cryptographic signature from Truepic that tracks the life of the digital artifact? The unbearable likeness of your being: Those amazingly lifelike avatars don’t have a clear ownership model today. Someone could make a deepfake of you, and what recourse do you have? However, if you owned the copyright to your digital likeness… Bing Chat Ads Arrive Paying for those GPT-4 inference costs: We knew they were coming, and now we know what they look like, at least one format. Bing Chat has ads that look a lot like what you see in web searches today, with a twist. Generative AI definitely has a revenue model. Meta Gets Objective Alignment is king: Meta rolled out another researcher-only generative AI model. However, this time it showed up with a demonstration app. Segment Anything is a new AI (foundation) model for identifying objects in images and being able to save them separately from the picture with two clicks. Canva, the True Believer Taking the lead over Microsoft: The Redmond giant has talked about DALL-E and GPT-4 in Microsoft Designer and coming to PowerPoint. Canva just started adding new features. A light skepticism from the company in December (ironically about new generative AI features) was replaced by more robust tools and a bigger vision. More About GAIN The show is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12 noon ET on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel. Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn. Also, participate in the live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout and may even show your comment on screen.

The Future of Life Institute, an organization funded by the Musk Foundation, issued a letter calling for a pause of "giant AI experiments" for six months. Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, AI legend Yoshua Bengio, and many thousands of others signed the letter. The idea behind the letter is that the risks posed by AI models such as GPT-4 are potentially so high that we must give policy-makers and technology leaders a chance to assess what guardrails are necessary. But is this a good idea? What are the risks of a pause? What are the objectives and conflicts of interest of the people that signed the letter? Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of Aisera, joined me to talk about the letter and all of the discussion it has sparked. We also discussed some alternative approaches, common misunderstandings, and how generative AI is rapidly changing assumptions about our world.  Sudhakar previously appeared on Voicebot Podcast episode 280. He is a former senior VP and GM at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMWare, and Pivotal. He was CEO at Caspida when the company was acquired by Splunk, where he assumed leadership for machine learning, AI, and analytics-based solutions. Sudhakar was also the CEO and founder of the big data startup Cetas, which was acquired by VMWare, and founded Sanera Systems, which was acquired by Brocade/McData. He began his career as an engineer at IBM and SGI and earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA. Go Bruins!