The Voicebot Podcast

Jean-Baptiste Martinoli's current job title is full stack innovator. That seems about right given what he done lately with generative AI tools. One of his latest creations, "Exrtraterrestrial Message," won the award for the best Sci-Fi short film at the Golden Minds film festival. The film was entirely created with generative AI tools. Today's interview was conducted at the Synthedia conference and there is a YouTube version with the full short film on Voicebot's YouTube channel. Martinoli reveals his process, the tools he used, and the fact that it only took about four hours to create. Jean-Baptiste is currently with Nextiva and is the former CTO and co-founder of Exo U., Mioplanent and KanariWorld. Early in his career, Martinoli was a software developer at Lotus, which was later acquired by IBM.

Muddu Sudhakar is the founding CEO of Aisera an automation software company built around conversational AI technologies. He breaks down how the company began with internal helpdesk solutions and moved into other parts of the enterprise, including dev ops, contact center, and broader customer experience solutions. He stresses how all of Aisera solutions are focused on automating business processes. Sudhakar 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.

Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. In this Part 2 from the Voice 2022 interviews, we have six more guests, including: - Sara Taheri of Prudential interviewing Kan Simms, VUX World (6:08) - Brandon Kaplan, Skilled Creative (9:35) - Corey Hill, Veritone (14:21) - Maddie Apple, Women in Voice (18:39) - Ian Utile, Attention Live (23:35) - Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner, 169 Labs (33:08) Topics range from the conversation design for the contact center and an integration layer for voice AI solutions to use cases in Europe and a new sporting event product that employs synthetic announcers and in-game data.

Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. Guests include: - Michal Stanislawek, Utter One / VoiceLunch (6:25) - Rupal Patel, Veritone (12:57) - Jeff McMahon, Voicify (18:46) - Collin Borns, Speechly (25:44) - Susan Westwater, Vixen Labs (33:08) - Pete Erickson, Modev / Voice Summit (36:58) Topics range from the use cases driving the most conversational AI demand today and best practices for voice strategy to whether there is a voice winter underway.

Anne Spalter is a world-renowned artist with artwork in museums, galleries, and collections throughout the globe. She is known for having created the curriculum for the first university-level digital art programs. That work was for the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University in the 1990s. More recently, Anne has emerged as a pioneer in creating fine art using AI-based text-to-image generators. She launched a collection of 501 pieces earlier this year called AI spaceships, which she made into NFTs, and they sold out in an hour. That collaboration was with Night Cafe. Since then, she has launched a new art show which includes a variety of artwork using OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney, which are other prominent text-to-image generators. Anne offers a perspective on the rise of synthetic media and how it is being received and used in the art world. She also shares some pro tips on how to use the new tools. This interview was conducted at the Synthedia synthetic media conference hosted by Voicebot in September.

Greg Cross, CEO and co-founder of Soul Machines recently took to the stage at the Synthedia synthetic media conference with a discussion titled: "The Robots are Coming and We Need Them Now." His thesis that we are already living in the future because the events over the past two years have accelerated societal change is backed up by mounting data. One area that is greatly impacted is the accelerated need for automation and often it requires a digital brain to determine what types of digital services and interactions will best serve a custom. Enter autonomous digital people. Greg's talk can also be viewed in Voicebot's YouTube channel where you will see as well as hear the digital humans. However, the presentation and the conversation with host Bret Kinsella are also well-suited to listening. If you want to know what 2025 looks like, you can see it all around you right now.

Shiv Rao is a cardiologist that co-founded Abridge in 2018 to help patients and doctors get better results from their encounters. Abridge listens to the doctor-patient conversations, provides a transcription, and categorizes specific details such as medications, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, and the care plan. Patients can access the conversation details through a mobile app that also highlights key words such as medications and procedures and provides click-through definitions. For doctors, the transcripts are packaged as physician notes which they can review and then automatically upload into the electronic medical record (EMR). Other solutions in the space focus on helping physicians get the right data into the right fields in the EMR. Abridge is focused on the rich data in the conversation beyond the required information. Rao was formerly a senior executive at UPMC Enterprises and serves as faculty and a working cardiologist at the Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He earned his MD from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dylan Fox founded Assembly AI in 2017 and was part of the Y Combinator Accelerator that year. Prior to founding the company, Dylan was a senior software engineer at Cisco. Assembly AI fashions itself as an expert in AI model training and provisioning. It researches the new AI models, trains and then deploys them and makes the models available as a service to other companies. The idea is to give developers easy access to high performing AI models without having to set up a hosting environment or train them.

Rabi Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot, the gifting assistant, in 2017. The company went through the Boost VC accelerator, where he was also an entrepreneur in residence, in 2017. Rabi was also CEO and co-founder of iCouchapp, which was acquired by Vidooly in 2016. Our discussion today is about a practical application for a virtual assistant. The corporate gift-giving market is $250 billion annually. Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot to make that process easy, efficient, and better matched with what the gift recipients actually like.

Nick Schwab is making his record fifth appearance on the Voicebot Podcast. You can hear him previously on episodes 2, 22, 58, and 96. In fact, I recommend you check out episodes 2 and 58 to learn more about his background and a sense of how his business has evolved from deal of the day to stock ticker to sleep sounds empire. The more notable aspects of Nick's appearance today are that he has not been on the podcast in three years, and Sleep Jar is one of the most successful Alexa skills and voice-first user experiences developed by a third party. We get into monetization, growth, working with the platforms, and sometimes no longer working with them. Nick Schwab began building Alexa skills in 2016 and founded Sleep Jar in 2017. Prior to committing to Sleep Jar full time in 2021, he was a senior software engineer at Livio, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. He is also an Alexa champion.

Val Jones joined Storyfile as CTO in January 2021 after a leadership role at Raxium and 16 years at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute has been at the forefront of synthetic media research and innovation for more than a decade. Storyfile has products that might be thought of by some as virtual humans or digital twins, but the company characterizes its solution as conversational video. After capturing robust video recordings of people discussing a particular set of topics, Storyfile creates an interactive lifelike avatar that you can talk to through a website, app, or kiosk. The most famous Storyfile user is the actor William Shatner though the project first gained widespread attention by capturing the experiences of holocaust survivors. Today, the technology is used for everything from entertainment, training, and answering product questions to preserving the memories of loved ones before they pass away. Jones discusses the use cases, technology evolution, and trade-offs in this rapidly growing market segment. Jones earned PhD, master's, and undergraduate degrees in computer science from USC.

Mark Fosdike co-founded Datch in 2017 after spending several years as an aircraft systems design engineer at CAV aerospace. His co-founder also had experience in industrial manufacturing at Siemens and Transpower. Both are engineers, so they had a keen sense of the challenges of getting access to information and entering data while working with heavy equipment in industrial manufacturing. Mark breaks down the key use cases, the tech stack for Datch, training the voice assistant, and much more in today's conversation. Custom voice assistants can do more than just play music and tell you the weather.

Paul Cutsinger is the director of Nvidia Omniverse Exchange, a platform for building simulation and metaverse environments. He discusses how companies are using Omniverse to simulate operations to improve efficiency and reduce operational risk, in addition to capabilities around metaverse and virtual human development. Prior to Nvidia, Paul ran developer education and evangelism programs for Amazon Alexa, worked on the Amazon App store, in gaming at Disney, and with browsers at Microsoft. He will be a featured speaker at Synthedia, the synthetic media conference, in September 2022. Synthedia is online and free to attend. Register here: https://bit.ly/synthedia-rising

Charles Cadbury breaks down how voice assistants can be used to drive awareness and sales for consumer brands. Say It Now was founded in 2018 and won the European Alexa Cup in 2019. The company made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic when it rolled out a solution to help raise funds for charities through smart speakers. Learnings from that initiative led to the development of Say It Now's Actionable Audio Ads which drive user interaction with branded Alexa skills. Cadbury breaks down the effectiveness of integrating consumer touchpoints through smart speakers, radio, and marketing campaigns to drive conversions. He also discusses recent neurological research on how consumers respond to these campaigns.

John Goscha founded Native Voice in 2020 to enable any custom voice assistant to become a first-class citizen on any device. That means it is not behind another voice assistant or buried in an app. It can instead be activated directly from any device by its branded wake word. We talk about why this is important to brands looking to deepen their relationship with customers and make access to their services more convenient. And, we talk about the Native Voice tech stack and what it takes to enable multiple, simultaneously available voice assistants. There is also a discussion about Native Voice's big announcement with Amazon and Skull Candy at Alexa Live.

Evan MacMillan started Gridspace 10 years ago to tackle a tough problem faced by contact centers: analyzing their conversational data. It's an application that stands apart from most conversational AI solutions with its focus on conversational intelligence as opposed to self-service. Before co-founding Gridspace, MacMillan was a co-founder at Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon during the heyday of online deals communities. He earned a degree in product design from Stanford.

The Amazon Alexa Live event for 2022 introduced a couple of dozen new features for developers, new revenue-sharing agreements, and is ushering in a new era of simultaneous voice assistants. The Two Voice Devs, Allen Firstenberg (Google Assistant GDE) and Mark Tucker (Alexa Champion), along with Voicebot's Eric Schwartz and Bret Kinsella break down the announcements and sort through the type of impacts we can expect.

David Liu is CEO of Sonde Health, a company using vocal biomarkers to assess patient health, wellness, and fitness. The company is white labeling its solution for app developers with initial products for respiratory and mental health problems. In the interview, Liu discusses the product, technology, and key markets serving as the first adopters. These include healthcare providers and payers along with one industry I wasn't expecting. Liu has been CEO of Sonde Health since 2019. He previously was chief operating officer at Quartet Health and education technology company Knewton and was a senior vice president at AOL. He earned an engineering degree from Purdue and an MBA from Columbia.

Timo Kunz has a PhD in operations research and spent more than a decade as a data scientist and analyst before founding Aflorithmic Labs in 2019. The company's first product, API.audio, is a developer toolset for quickly adding synthetic voice audio combined with other features such as music and effects. It is promoted as the first audio-as-a-service solution for developers that enables control of key audio characteristics without the need for separate post-production audio engineering. Key use cases are in advertising, marketing, and media.

Voice assistants are broadly adopted by consumers and for several consumer facing activities such as customer support. Kim Conti, vice president of product, and Chen Zhang, chief technology officer of RAIN Agency share their experience building custom voice assistants for enterprise processes and products in general and more recently for deskless workers. They also share the details behind their beta version custom voice assistant for auto mechanics which is expected to be generally available later this year. Conti has held product leadership roles at Travelers while Zhang was on the NLP software engineering team at Apple for the Chinese version of Siri and was later engineering director of AI speech and NLP for Midea.

Topics today include Amazon's new Astro Robot in operation, the rise of voice AI in the contact center, the increase in acquisitions and large funding rounds, custom branded assistants, Google's sunsetting of conversational actions, and a whole lot more. Speakers breaking down the news of 2022 so far: - Sarah Andrew Wilson - former CCO at Matchbox.io before Volley acquisition - Paul Sweeney - chief product officer at Webio - Eric Schwartz - head writer at Voicebot.ai - Bret Kinsella - founder of Voicebot.ai

Braden Ream is CEO of Voiceflow, a leading conversational AI design collaboration solution combined with a no-code platform for deploying voice apps. Voiceflow was founded in 2019 and has tens of thousands of users and more than 400 companies. Today we discuss Voiceflow's evolution into enterprise solutions, its expanding feature base, and the top customer use cases. We also delve into how the conversational AI industry has changed including the shift to custom branded voice assistants as well as the impact of the recent Google Assistant news that it is shutting down Conversational Action developer support.

James Poulter and Vixen Labs along with the Open Voice Network and Veritone surveyed 6000 consumers in the U.S., UK, and Germany about their perception and use of voice assistants and smart speakers. We break down the findings and discuss the implications for the industry as a whole. Trends, data, industry news -- all the things you like. Poulter co-founded Vixen Labs in 2018. He previously was head of emerging platforms and partnerships for LEGO Group where he did some voice AI work and early in his career was an associate director at Edelman.

Google announced it will be sunsetting support for third-party conversational actions–the voice apps that work with Google Assistant–in June 2023. It decided there was no point in maintaining a separate app store just for voice and it is encouraging conversational action developers to port their experiences over to Android apps. This special edition of the Voicebot Podcast showcases Allen Firstenberg and Mark Tucker, both active developers of conversational actions and other voice app experiences. Firstenberg is a GDE for Google Assistant and Mark Tucker is an Alexa Champion so both have some notable accomplishments in the space. They are both also well known in the voice developer community in part from their Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube show. We discuss the impact on the Google Assistant and Alexa ecosystems and how this will shape the future of voice assistants.

Brandon Kaplan founded Skilled Creative in 2017 and continues to serve as CEO. The agency is well known for delivering voice AI strategy, solutions, and analytics for top media and consumer good companies ranging from Meredith and HBO to Pottermore and Pepsico. In 2022, Skilled Creative was merged with two other agencies to form Journey to create a new "experience" agency with expertise in immersive technologies such as AI, Metaverse, and physical world activations. Kaplan also serves as Chief Innovation Officer of the combined company while directly managing the voice AI business. We discuss the past, present, and future of voice AI, how enterprises are managing the shift to conversation, and the value of the Journey agency model.

John Kelvie is CEO of Bespoken, a leader in automated testing software for voice assistants. We discuss his company's journey from 2016 to 2022. And, we cover the voice assistant market evolution from Alexa and Google Assistant to custom voice assistants, customer support bots, and other novel applications. That discussion also takes us from predominantly consumer applications of voice assistants to the enterprise. You might also enjoy going back to episode 6 or 55 where John shared the perspective of the early days of Bespoken.

Keyvan Mohajer is CEO of SoundHound (SOUN), the creator of both a beloved music recognition mobile app and one of the most successful custom voice assistant development platforms. The company recently went public and carries a market capitalization of over $1 billion. We talk about the volatility of the stock but the real focus is drilling down into the company's business model, the use cases, and what the market wants in voice assistant technology today. Mohajer founded SoundHound in 2004 while studying for his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. The company's voice assistant technology is used in solutions for companies ranging from Mercedes and Hyundai to Snap, Netflix, and White Castle. Its music recognition mobile app has been downloaded more than 300 million times.

Dana Young founded AIPEX in 2017 to solve a problem he faced as an independent vacation rental property host. Voice assistants could provide his guests with a better experience and save him the challenge of answering a lot of redundant questions. He started by building Alexa skills and Google Actions. AIPEX now has a shared service instance of Alexa for Hospitality which makes the solution scalable and easy to use for other property owners, hotels, and assisted living communities. Dana shares in detail his journey building the first self-service solution for vacation rental and hotel owners, the key use cases, and evolution of the company.

Ilya Gelfenbeyn is CEO and Kylan Gibbs is chief product officer of Inworld. The company has a novel voice AI service that gives brains to in-game and metaverse characters and enables them to have personalities, backstories, knowledge, and the ability to converse. It's an impressive combination of conversational AI technologies for configuring characters and operating them in virtual worlds. There is a lot of talk about metaverses and how conversational AI may play a role. Inworld has the most interesting angle I have seen to date on this topic. Gelfenbeyn was CEO and co-founder of API.ai which was acquired by Google in 2016 and became Dialogflow. Gibbs is the former product manager for conversational AI products at DeepMind.

Raj Koneru is the CEO of Kore.ai. He founded the company in 2014 to tackle the need for automated interactions in messaging. That led to conversational AI services for messaging platforms ranging from white label solutions for enterprises to integration with WhatsApp Apple Messages for Business and other platforms. The company also expanded into voice services and last fall raised $70 million in a Series C funding round. Today, we discuss the evolution of chatbots and voice assistants, what enterprises are focused on automating now, and the role conversational AI will play in the metaverse.

Zohaib Zohaib Ahmed co-founded Resemble AI in 2019 after working as a software engineer at high profile and innovative companies including Magic Leap, Hipmunk, and Blackberry. Zohaib's work at Magic Leap introduced him to novel UI interactions and his work analyzing user data led to deep learning models. From there he began to explore synthetic media and speech synthesis and Resemble was born. Resemble AI graduated from the Betaworks Synthetic Camp accelerator back in 2019 and was recently in the news for creating Andy Warhol's voice for a new Netflix documentary.

Respeecher is one of the leading voice cloning solutions on the market today. It is also headquartered in Ukraine. In my recent update with Alex Serdiuk, I learned that despite the war in Ukraine, Respeecher was, in fact, still operating and fulfilling customer contracts. So, we agreed to catch up on Respeecher's current business and also let everyone know the company is still operating despite the war. You are really going to like this discussion. We talk about voice cloning for media, how it's different from speech to text, deepfakes, ethical considerations, and a whole lot more. Alex Serdiuk is CEO of Respeecher. The company has worked on several high-profile movie and TV projects including The Mandalorian where they recreated the voice of a young Luke Skywalker in an emmy-award winning piece of work.

Chris Maeda has an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. He was hacking LISP machines in the late 1980s in his first AI job and then moved onto the famed Xerox PARC. After that, he wound up doing a lot of customer relationship management software startups including co-founding Rubric Software which merged with Broadbase in 2000 and later was absorbed into Kana where he was EVP and CTO. He also became CEO of a company that eventually acquired the marketing software solutions from Kana and added the title of CEO of MailMonitor an email marketing software company. In 2017, Mida co-founded Botco which is focused on AI-powered natural language marketing and eCommerce automation for enterprises.

Chris Ume is a visual effects expert with many years experience in entertainment and corporate projects. In 2020, he began experimenting with deep fake technology, sourcing AI models from obscure Russian websites, and experimenting with new techniques. That led to a collaboration with an American actor known for Tom Cruise parody videos and Deep Tom Cruise was born. Following, the viral success of those deep fake videos and others, Ume co-founded Metaphysic.ai in 2021 and the company recently closed a $7.5 million funding round.

Max Child makes his third appearance on the Voicebot Podcast to discuss the evolution of the voice games market as well as Volley's recent acquisition of Matchbox.io. Matchbox is the creator of the popular Alexa game Question of the Day and Max outlines Volley's strategy behind the purchase and how it fits into the company's portfolio. We talk extensively about voice app discovery and monetization and what is working today. Max is a graduate of Harvard and was an analyst at Boston Consulting Group before setting out to create games.

Kunden Kumar is head of AI at Descript. He was a co-founder of the innovative synthetic speech company Lyrebird which Descript acquired in 2019. He has a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Montreal and a computer science degree from IIT. Kumar was also a researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithems (MILA) where he was mentored by Joshua Bengio.

Alex Quinn founded Disruptel while still in high school and the team just landed a big deal with the world's fourth-largest television maker. He says TCL was won over by the opportunity to implement the first voice assistant with eyes. Disruptel's Deep Frame product knows what is on the screen and can identify it in real time. It has an AI-vision system and an extensive facial recognition database along with a knowledge graph that gathers text-based data. A natural language voice assistant enables any number of questions about the content on screen and can be coupled with targeted advertising and voice commerce referrals. It's an interesting application that extends the boundaries of voice assistant expectations.

Six industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. This is part two of our two-part series. Commentary from: Joao Alqueres, Iara Benjamin Brown, ConverseNow Pete Erickson, Modev Hannes Heikenheimo, Speechly Mike Zagorsek, SoundHound Dylan Zwick, Pulse Labs

Seven industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. Commentary from: Audrey Arbeeny Chithra Durgam Jason Fields Maarten Lens-FitzGerald Todd Mozer Patricia Scanlon Amy Stapleton

Today we break down key findings from the Healthcare Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2022. The data includes 2019 - 2021 trends and analysis including market size, user adoption demographics, what patients want, and much more. This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and healthcare industries. There is a companion to this episode released on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show.

Today's episode breaks down some of the key findings from the Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report for 2021. Data presented goes back to 2018 and shows a rising trend in adoption. Learn about total users, total consumer interest, product categories, average voice shopping order size, demographic data around users and much more. This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and retail industries. There is a companion to this episode release on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show.

This is the U.S. edition and the Consumer edition of our two-part year in review episodes. We discuss the industry globally from a U.S. perspective with three guests that include: Chithra Durgam - Founder Blue Check Skill which helps bring celebrities and brands onto Amazon Alexa and also is a practicing dentist. Todd Mozer - CEO of Sensory, a company he founded in 1994. The company has been adding voice AI features to consumer products for over 25 years and can be found in billions of devices. Eric Schwartz - Head Writer Voicebot.ai and the author of many of the stories we discuss today.

This week we discuss voice year in review for 2021. All of the guests in this episode are based in Europe but operate globally so you will get both perspectives. Also, the conversation is heavily skewed toward enterprise voice applications because that drove so much of the important news in 2021. We start with an in-depth discussion of acquisitions and funding which were bigger in 2021 than in any previous year. Guests include: - Otto Soderlund is CEO and co-founder of Speechly which is pioneering a new full-duplex and super-fast voice interface for the web and mobile. - Dominik Meissner is a co-founder of 169 labs. The company has worked with Sony, Ikea, Lotto, Mercedes Benz, MINI, and Diageo. - Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald is the creator of Open Voice, one of the most popular newsletters in the industry, and founder of the Project Zilver consortium which seeks to make the lives of elder adults better through the use of voice assistants.

Jon Stine is the Executive Director and founder of the Open Voice Network. Prior to founding OVN, Stine was global director of retail sales at Intel and a director of North American retail at Cisco. He has an MS in telecommunications from the University of Oregon. Today we talk about voice assistant interoperability, standards, and keeping AI systems open and consumer-friendly.

Raghu Ravinutala co-founded Yellow.ai in 2015 to solve a problem he personally had encountered, poor customer support experiences. A former IC chip designer, Raghu was drawn by the idea that conversational AI combined with back-end systems integration could fully automate a wide array of customer problems nearly instantly without needing to wait on hold for support reps. In 2016, the company was accepted to the Microsoft Accelerator and the company counts over 750 enterprise clients globally. Prior to Yellow, Raghu was a Senior Manager for integrated circuit design engineering at Broadcom, VP of product management at Teleradtech, and a senior IC designer at Texas Instruments. In today's interview, Raghu talks about the origin of Yellow.ai, how the company grew rapidly by supporting WhatsApp integration, how messaging is so much different as a channel than a chatbot on a website, what the enterprise really needs in conversational AI, the myth around the superiority of human customer service agents, what are Moments of Trust in the customer relationship, and the need for Dynamic AI Agents that support every customer channel. It's a wide-ranging discussion that illuminates several news ideas in conversational AI.

Vinay Shukla is CEO and co-founder of ConverseNow and the former founder and President of Endeavour Software. Endeavour was acquired by Genpact in 2016 where Vinay served as vice president of digital for two years before founding ConverseNow. Today we discuss ConverseNow's original focus, its pivot to serving restaurants in late 2019, and how the pandemic has transformed that industry. We also discuss how the company went from serving zero to over 1000 restaurants in less than two years. Earlier in his career, Vinay was an assistant vice president of technology at Barclays and a solutions architect at UBS.

Roger Kibbe is Senior Developer Evangelist at Viv Labs which is the home of Bixby in Samsung Research Americas. Today, we discuss the evolution of Bixby and voice assistants over the past five years. In particular, we break down the new Bixby Home features and the rise of AI in smart home features. We also go into depth around the importance of command and control voice interactions. Prior to Samsung, Kibbe founded Voice Craft, a voice app development firm which was preceded by 12 year at Gap Inc. where he oversaw customer experience and logistics technology strategy. He also worked at Accenture early in his career.

Shawn Wilkie is CEO of Talkatoo. A cross-platform speech-to-text solution for Veterinarians. It streamlines patient data input and works across multiple platforms. He founded the company in 2019 with the first product arriving late in the year. The onset of the pandemic led to rapid acceleration of vet adoption which continues through today and helped to secure a new funding round in September. Wilkie is also the host of the Veterinary Innovation Podcast which began in 2019. Prior to Talkatoo he was CEO of Robotnik and founder of Sheepdog.

Elena Parlatore is the senior director of global digital consumer experience at Pepsico. Her role in the consumer insights group focuses on all of the ways consumers interact with Pepsico products and channels. A big part of that work is focused on consumer interaction with conversational AI technologies through Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, website chatbots, and the call center. Today, we discuss the objectives, technologies, channels, and the results of Pepsico's many conversational AI initiatives. It is a rare look inside the way that large consumer goods enterprises approach conversational AI.

Rob Carpenter founded Valyant in 2017 with a specific focus on developing a voice assistant drive-through solution for fast food restaurants. While Carpenter insists Valyant is building a platform that can support other use cases in the future, he also is clearly focused on mastering the drive-through use case and goes into depth about the hardware, software, and workflow Valyant has built. We discuss the key technical and business process challenges that Valyant had to overcome and what their customers set as key solution requirements. In addition, Carpenter breaks down Valyant's tech stack and the competitive environment.