VUX World

Tom Hewitson, Founder and CEO, Labworks.io, joins us to share how he built a business on Alexa and Google Assistant, how he finds, keeps hold and monetises users, design best practice and advice for those looking to do the same.In 2017 and 2018, when Amazon Alexa began rolling our in-skill purchasing (ISP), many thought that there'd be a gold rush on the Alexa platform. Business will be built, money will be made and all will be well. It happened with the App Store on mobile, after all.There was two problem that most developers were facing: how do you create something that's good enough to keep users coming back for more, and then how do you create an offer for those users that's worth paying for?Those challenges turned out to be pretty difficult to overcome and, to date, only three companies have managed to reach the levels of success many were aiming for in the Alexa space: Matchbox, with their suite of quizzes and kids games, Invoked apps with it's load of sleep and ambient sounds and, our guest this week, Labworks, with Voice Arcade.One weekend, wanting to explore Alexa for investigatory purposes, in case any clients were to ask about it in future, Tom Hewiston, founder of then-chatbot agency, Labworks, set about building a game.After launching the game and pretty much forgetting about it, some months later, Tom received a call from Amazon. Turns out, Tom's game was the third most popular game on the Alexa platform. Amazon were starting to pay developers for having popular skills as an incentive for them to continue improving skills and developing new skills.These rewards were enough for Tom to employ someone to help build out more games. Labworks pivoted from building chatbots for clients and into building games for Alexa and the rest is history.We chat to Tom about his journey, what he's learned, his thoughts on the industry and advice for others looking to build successful skills and actions on Alexa and Google Assistant.Here's the running order:00:02:50​ About Tom Hewitson and Labworks.io00:05:50​ Last year's Alexa skills usage00:09:30​ Was it good timing to launch Voice Arcade?00:11:15​ Ten hot takes on voice: what's changed in voice since 2019?00:13:00​ What's changed for the better?00:15:20​ Developer rewards: how helpful were they?00:19:15​ What works and what doesn't for in-skill purchasing?00:20:00​ What's the difference in typical ISPs vs Voice Arcade?00:22:15​ Challenges with ISPs, offering more value than you're asking for in return00:24:30​ How are you showing value?00:26:00​ Vishnu Saran: How are you solving discoverability?00:30:40​ Marek Mis: Advice for hobbyist voice devs wanting to go pro?00:33:40​ Is there much experimentation left?00:38:40​ How do you prioritise and test features?00:40:55​ Any new platform features you're excited about?00:43:00​ Matt Buck: Have you thought about putting your games in apps or on web?00:47:09​ Katy Boungard: Brand identity and sonic branding00:49:20​ Richard Warzecha: Discovering features within skills00:50:00​ How much time is spent on happy path vs everything else?00:55:44​ Manual testing vs code testing00:57:05​ Example of something that took a lot of iteration to get right00:58:35: Richard Warzecha: Transferable principles from games to other voice experiences01:03:00​ Tooling and Jovo01:04:00​ General takeaways and contact detailsLinksLabworks.ioFollow Tom Hewitson on TwitterJoin Tom Hewitson on LinkedInSay "Alexa, open Voice Arcade"Say "Hey Google, open Voice Arcade" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Derek Roberti is the VP Technology, North America, at Cognigy, based in California. He joins us to share his insights and observations on using conversational AI automation in the enterprise for automating service delivery. We chat to Derek about:Cognigy and its historyDemocratising AIThe need for market education The balance between technical capability and ease of use in conversational AI toolsMarrying conversational AI with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)Whether conversational AI tools will convergeHow and if we'll see conversational automation within voice assistantsLinksVisit Cognigy.comConnect with Derek Roberti on Linkedin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nate Brown is the Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, world-leading CX consultancy. He joins us to share how a customer-centric culture shaped around customer feedback can create the conditions and insights needed to build products and services that customers love. The exact same methodologies and practices can feed directly into your conversational automation strategy to make sure you're consistently meeting customer needs.At the same time, the data and insights you produce from the automated conversations you have with customers can be like gold dust, and can be fed back into the voice of the customer operation in the rest of the business.We chat with Nate about:The value of a voice of the customer strategyThe importance of staff feedbackVoice of the customer processThe listening pathEmpowerment and actionSentiment vs intentImplementation challengesLinksOfficium LabsConnect with Nate Brown on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When it comes to making customer interactions with conversational AI more human-like, there's often one thing missing. Emotion.We chat to Nico Perony about how OTO.ai is being used to understand emotion and sentiment of users in order for businesses to create more compelling customer experiences.Married with conversational AI, bots can be more sensitive to the caller based on their emotional state and even do things like escalate calls to an agent based on an angry customer response.It's also being used to support agents in call centres to appraise tone and improve how agents speak with customers, as well as in gaming applications to detect abuse and toxicity and escalate occurrences to moderators.There is huge potential for this technology, not only in automating customer experience in a more human-like way, but also to gather insights from customer and staff voice relations and use it to improve the quality of service offered.We also continued this discussion on Clubhouse afterwards. Follow @kanesimms on Clubhouse for more open ended after show discussions.LinksVisit OTO.aiConnect with Nico on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I was on the Voicebot podcast, Bret asked me whether we're going through a voice first winter. I said that I didn't think so, nor did I really care. There are opportunities to do good work and enhance people's lives regardless. However, there has been an undercurrent in pockets of the industry where some folks are becoming frustrated that voice hasn't reached its potential (however you define that).Over the past few weeks, founder of WitLingo, Ahmed Bouzid was involved in a conversation at the popular VoiceLunchmeet where a participant stated that:‘Beyond the weather, time, and the occasional timer and alarm,’ they mused out loud, ‘am I myself really using my Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant that much in my life? I mean, really and honestly, am I? No, actually, not really…. So, if I am not using them that much and yet I am such a believer in Voice First, what hope is there for the rest of the world?’He wrote a piece summarising his thoughts. This coincided with a post from Bespoken.io founder, John Kelvie's post claiming voice is stuck.The primary questions raised in both of these two pieces are:Is voice living up to its promise?Where is the true value in voice first?Has there been enough improvement in the technology and ecosystem to support its own ecosystem like the App Store?To debate this, we brought along Voicebot.ai founder Bret Kinsella, together with Ahmed and John to figure out where we actually stand and where we need to go next. We also continued this discussion on Clubhouse afterwards. Follow @kanesimms on Clubhouse for more open ended after show discussions.LinksRead voicebot.aiCheck out WitLingo and BespokenRead Voice is stuckRead The #VoiceFirst User Interface Has a Use Case Fit ProblemRead Voice first sucksFollow Ahmed, John and Bret on TwitterConnect with Ahmed, John and Bret on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Resemble.ai is a cutting edge synthetic voice (text-to-speech) provider that allows anyone or any brand to create their own, customer TTS solution to use across any and all channels. From IVR, Alexa and Google Assistant to narrating videos and marketing materials and even voicing game characters. With just 50 lines of speech, you could have your own dedicated brand voice that brings a consistent and elevated customer experience to your conversational applications. With quicker-than-real-time processing, the low latency capabilities makes having a conversation with a Resemble.ai-voiced assistant as natural as can be.In this episode of VUX World, we're joined by founder and CEO, Zohaib Ahmed, to discuss the work Resemble is doing to help brands create stand-out conversational experiences. We discuss what Resemble is and how it works, the value of having your own custom voice, the use cases and applications it's being used for, the process for creating, the editing and publishing tools for customising intonation and emotion, as well as the ethical considerations around voice cloning, fraud and deep fakes.00:00 Intro02:55 About Zohaib Ahmed and Resemble.ai04:47 What are people using Resemble.ai for today?07:37 How much dialogue is needed to create a TTS voice?08:27 Voice Talent Pool: what's that?11:50 Bondad: How far off are we from high quality rendering at run time with low latency?14:00 What's the process for creating a custom brand voice?17:00 Are call centres cloning staff voices?19:00 An alternative approach from a branded assistant21:10 Ethics of voice cloning24:20 Resemblyzer and tackling speaker verification27:40 Matthew James-Dewstowe: Can you tweak the voice once its created?31:40 Jay Ruparel: How do you handle dynamic speech and keep the voice integrity?37:40 Sean Thornton: Predicting emotion41:00 Heidi Cohen: Regionalisation and localisation44:45 Real time translation of speech48:20 Jay Ruparel: Thoughts on filler words like 'um', 'ah' etc51:37 Proving the value and ROI01:00:40 Where can people find out more about Resemble.aiLinksVisit Resemble.ai Follow Resemble.ai on TwitterZohaib Ahmed on Twitter and LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mihai Antonescu joins us to discuss the history of voice at Mercedes, the origins of the HeyMercedes voice assistant and the process for building it.You'll also learn tips and tricks that'll help you put together your approach to creating your own assistant, as well as how to understand and measure the business value voice assistants can bring.Mihai asked us before the show to challenge him with our questions, and we certainly hope we did.LinksConnect with Mihai Antonescu on LinkedIn or Twitter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Justin Randall, Chief Innovation Officer at Comwave, one of Canada's largest independent telco companies, joins us to share his experiences of designing, building and implementing a Google DialogFlow agent in the contact centre.We'll cover the drivers for doing it, the process he followed, the things he learned and advice for doing the same.Timestamps00:00 Intro04:30 About Justin Randall and Comwave10:30 Replacing the IVR12:23 What can 'Penny' do?13:39 How do you determine success for your conversational AI19:30 Understanding where you should start21:50 Who manages the updates and maintenance?23:20 Glen Ritchie: What KPIs do you use for your conversational AI?26:15 How much time is spent defining requirements?27:44 Heidi Cohen: What books and resources would you recommend?29:29 John Novak: Do you use a tree structure like in IVR?32:23 Deymi Campos: How fast can you deploy a change in your conversational AI?35:50 What does your automated testing set up look like?40:24 Andrew Francis: Are you using the DialogFlow Telephone Gateway?43:45 Deymi Campos: Sometimes different TFNs need different config, do you have this feature?45:15 Georgios Tserdanelis: Did you design a persona for Penny or use a custom voice?48:37 jusfc: Is Penny available as a chatbot as well?51:10 Advice for people starting out in their conversational AI journey56:00 Closing thoughts from JustinLinks/booksConnect with Justin RandallCognitive Virtual Assistants Using Google DialogflowVoice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant (Manning)Designing Voice User Interfaces (O'Reilly)Designing Bots (O'Reilly) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With almost all call centres looking to us AI to automate an increasing number of conversations with customers, what does the future of customer service look like? And what's the future of work going to look like for your staff? What can you do today to prepare for an AI-first future, both from a customer experience and staffing perspective?Lots of big questions will need answering in 2021, and to get you started, we're joined by Head of Vonage AI, Noam Fine, to answer those questions and more about the future of customer service, the future of customer experience and the future of work for CS agents and managers.LinksVonage AIConnect with Noam Fine on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan joins us to share his insights on the most important recent developments in voice AI technology and how it's enabling business transformation, as well as some of the emerging trends we're likely to see unfold in 2021.Voice AI is disrupting all kinds of industries and providing opportunities for almost every and any business unit. None, perhaps, has the potential to prosper more than the contact centre.With the potential to automate front end conversations and assist live agents, conversational AI could be the underlying capability that enables organisations to both increase self-service and improve customer experience, while creating operational efficiencies and empowering staff.Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder of Opus Research, has more than his fair share of experience both with contact centre technology and speech technology on the whole. For over 30 years, Dan's been working with and covering voice AI and conversational technologies with a focus on organisational transformation.Linksopusresearch.netFollow Dan on Twitter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.