The Voicebot Podcast

Edward Saatchi is the founder of Fable Studio which is bringing AR and VR characters to life for the metaverse. Fable is creating both characters and a world where you can interact with them, but more interestingly, where these virtual beings can learn and evolve. Prior to Fable Studio, Saatchi was the founder of the Emmy Award-winning VR movie studio Oculus Story Studio. Earlier, he was the founder of NationalField which provided social media technology for the Obama for America organization and presidential campaigns. Saatchi has degrees from Sorbonne and Oxford.

Greg Cross is co-founder and chief business officer of Soul Machines, a leader in the creation of virtual humans (aka digital people). We discuss the origin story that goes back to 2012 as a research organization set up at the University of Aukland through the founding of Soul Machines in 2016, how 2020 accelerated the business, and what is happening today. In addition, we delve into the world of digital employees, the integration of voice AI solutions, touch on the metaverse, and review specific use cases by industry. Greg is the former chairman of SLI Systems, CEO and co-founder of PowerbyProxi, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and former managing director of Microsoft New Zealand.

Amazon just announced a custom voice assistant deal with Disney and a bushel full of new products including a smart display you hang on the wall and a home robot. After the event concluded, a few of us gathered in the Voicebot Discord Community to discuss what we saw, our initial reactions, and what it is likely to mean for the industry. Plus, we learn which of the new products the podcast guests are planning to buy and why. Joining me in the conversation are Sarah Andrew Wilson of Matchbox.io, Allen Firstenberg from Objective Consulting, Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io, Dave Kemp of Oaktree Products. and Andrew Herndon from Voicebot.ai.

Hannes Heikinheimo co-founded Speechly in 2016 with the vision to create a low-latency, real-time streaming speech recognition API. Today, Speechly offers an API that it says is the fastest voice UI for the web and other platforms. Prior to Speechly, he was a data science partner at Reaktor, a language engineer working on Siri for Apple, the analytics lead at game-maker Rovio, a Senior Data Scientist at Nokia, and a machine learning researcher at Helsinki University of Technology where he earned his PhD.

Daniel Kornev is chief product officer for DeepPavlov.ai which is the developer behind the open source framework for building voice assistants. The company has raised over $9 million in funding and has over 50,000 downloads and 5000 Stars on GitHub. In addition, Kornev served as an advisor to the Alexa Prize team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Before DeepPavlov, Daniel Kornev spent two years working as a consultant and interim executive with a variety of conversational AI startups. He also was a Senior Product Manager at Yandex where he worked on some of the core feature sets for the Alice voice assistant. Earlier, he was a technical program manager at Google and a program manager and dev evangelist at Microsoft. Daniel Kornev has an M.S. in computer science and has done extensive research in human-computer interaction.

Andy Mauro is the CEO of Automat which he co-founded in 2016. Its solution creates personalized shopping experiences for eCommerce that learns the needs of customers through a conversational interaction that then returns better product recommendations and higher conversion rates. The AI part of the solution starts by ingesting a product catalog and labeling the content to help drive better understanding about how the products fulfill needs beyond categories and specifications. It complements this with a conversational chat interface that can interact with shoppers and surface the appropriate product catalog item based on their needs. Notably, prior to founding Automat, Andy was senior director of Nuance's Innovations Group and the product manager for Nuance's custom voice assistant Nina, launched in 2014. He spent over 15 years at Nuance and witnessed its key growth era firsthand. Andy dissects the custom voice assistant market's origins and status today which is a nice launching point for discussing Automat and the company's strategy around e-commerce.

Jan Sedivy is a Researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics and Robotics at the Czech Technical University (CTU) and a member of the faculty of electrical engineering. This is also his alma mater where he earned a PhD in 1983. Jan served as the faculty leader for Team Alquist from CTU which was the 2021 winner of the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge. The SoicalBot Grand Challenge is for university teams to develop conversational bots that can hold a conversation with a user for an average of 20 minutes and receive positive reviews. About a dozen teams are selected each year to compete. The team from the Czech Technical University has been a finalist in all four competitions for the SocialBot Grand Challenge, coming in second twice and third once. This year's competition yielded its first win for the top prize and the $500,000 reward. We discuss the Alexa Prize process, expectations, tools, and technical approaches in today's discussion including how the university teams use the funding that Amazon offers to the semi-finalists. I don't believe there has ever been a conversation revealing this much about the inner workings of the Alexa Prize competition. In addition, we go well beyond this topic with Jan because of his rich history in the industry. After several years as an assistant professor focused on digital signal processing, he moved to IBM where he worked on speech recognition and language interaction for over 15 years. From there, he spent time at Google before returning to academia. He is also an advisor to several companies working on a range of solutions including virtual humans and mental health chatbots.

Voice assistants are used across many devices and in many different contexts. The car is what we characterize as among the big 3 along with smart speakers and smartphones. These are the surfaces that have the largest voice assistant user bases both overall and in terms of active users. The recently published In-Car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2021 is the jumping-off point for today's discussion between Bret Kinsella and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. This report includes consumer adoption data from the U.S., UK, and Germany and includes consumer trend data going back to 2019. There is also a lot of analysis dedicated to the capabilities and momentum of the key vendors providing voice assistant technology to automakers. In addition, we discuss trends in the news around automaker voice assistant related announcements. Today's discussion is a quick way to get oriented around that state of voice assistant adoption and capabilities in the car. For those of you looking for more details, go to research.voicebot.ai.

Ryan Star is CEO and founder of Stationhead, a social audio app that enables anyone to start their own social, global radio program. He is a recording artist that got his big break playing at CBGBs in New York and then opening for Bon Jovi when he was still in high school. Today, he has more than 40 million plays on Spotify and around 200,000 monthly listeners. Ryan has worked in entertainment long enough to understand where there are gaps for creators, particularly those that haven't hit it big yet. That led him to create Stationhead in 2017. Some Stationhead show DJs have had over 200,000 concurrent listeners on their shows and successful monetization. It is a different angle on social audio and an innovative model.

Ryan Steelberg is President of Veritone. He co-founded the company with his brother in 2014 and it became publicly traded on NASDAQ in 2017. Ryan has a notable record of successful startup exits in his career that spans 25 years in tech. In earlier companies, as you will hear today, the Steelberg brothers applied large-scale data processing to advertising before that was commonplace and were instrumental in the development of what we now call programmatic advertising. Veritone today provides an AI platform, aiWare, that applies large-scale processing of unstructured data to a variety of use cases that range from revenue generation to back-office operations. Prior to Veritone, Ryan was CEO of Brand Affinity technologies, Head of Radio at Google after the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting where he was president and co-founder, CEO of 2CAN Media, and President of AdForce, a company he co-founded while still an undergrad at UCLA.

Bernadette Nixon is CEO of Algolia, a company that processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year for over 10,000 customers. She joined the company in early 2020 in the midst of the global pandemic and what turned out to be explosive growth. Prior to Algolia, Nixon was CEO of Alfresco, President of SDL, and an SVP at OpenText. She has worked across the spectrum of search from pure SaaS solutions to open source and now is steering the API-first solution approach at Algolia which includes elements of customized programmability and SaaS. We go deep this week on search, how it is evolving, and the nuances of voice search. We also discuss Algolia's recent $150 million funding round which conferred unicorn status on the company with a valuation exceeding $2 billion.

Conversation designers Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe discuss the practical knowledge required to design effective conversations with things such as chatbots and voice assistants. We also discuss the evolution of conversation design over time and across modes of interaction. Diana Deibel is a director at Grand Studio where she helps clients create user-focused experiences, including many that involve voice user interfaces. Before Grand Studio, Deibel was a VUX design lead at Allstate, voice user interface designer at Emmi Solutions, and a media producer. Rebecca Evanhoe is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute where she teaches a graduate course in conversational user experience design. She is also a founding contributor to Women in Voice and earlier was a conversation design consultant at AWS and Mobiquity and a writing instructor at the University of Florida.

Natalie Monbiot is head of strategy and business development for Hour One. She is working with companies across a number of industries as varied as real estate, eLearning, automotive, and consumer brands and is shaping Hour One's go-to-market and growth strategies. Prior to Hour One, Monbiot was an SVP at Publicis where she worked on new technologies and the Samsung account. She was an SVP at UM Worldwide before that focused on digital and strategic innovation and earlier in her career worked at IPG Media Lab and also previously worked in media planning for fortune 500 clients. Monbiot earned a Masters's Degree from Oxford.

Yakir Buskilla is CEO and co-founder of Cocohub, a publicly traded company on the Israeli stock exchange best known for its no-code chatbot development suite. Recently, the company is increasingly associated with virtual human technology, and Anna, one of the characters it developed as a chatbot avatar for deployment on Zoom and through other video channels. Buskilla took over as CEO after several years at Nielsen where he oversaw the company's R&D operation in Israel. Earlier, he co-founded Semanix which was focused on improving patent search technology. He has a background in Machine Learning, Big Data, cloud hosting, and back-end software development and began his career as a software engineer.

Orchid Bertelsen is head of digital strategy and innovation at Nestle USA. She has created the digital innovation road maps for over 40 Nestle brands as well as delivering new projects such as Ruth the cookie coach virtual human. Prior to Nestle, Orchid spent several years in the digital agency world and in consulting. Today we discuss the anatomy of a virtual human project for a consumer brand - the rationale, the tech, the project stages, and more. We also discuss Alexa skill development for consumer brands circa 2016 and how that shaped the development of a virtual human cookie coach in 2021.

Brandon Kaplan is CEO of Skilled Creative, an agency he founded in 2017 that focuses on helping leading media and consumer brands deploy voice technologies for user engagement and commerce. Today, we discuss his firm's work with HBO, Pottermore, Meredith, and a few consumer brands along with dominant trends in the industry. Kaplan received an outstanding achievement award for industry contributions from Project Voice in 2021. Prior to his current agency, Kaplan was President of Ruxly Creative and co-founder of Evantage. He began his career at Stanley Black and Decker.

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is founder and CEO of the non-profit Women in Voice which was started in 2018. She is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space, a popular conference speaker, and a consultant for voice user experience design. After earning an undergraduate degree in French, Photography, and Graphic Design, Bajorek received a Masters in Linguistics from UC Davis and then of PhD in speech language technology from the University of Arizona. Today we discuss the latest growth figures and activities for Women in Voice, a recent VC elevator pitch event for female founders in the voice AI industry, and some of the latest trends in voice user experience design.

Brad Stone is the New York Times bestselling author of two books about Amazon, The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound. Together, they tell a complete story of Amazon over 25 years of evolution. Amazon Unbound includes an in-depth look at the origin behind Amazon Alexa and Echo and their implications for the industry. Stone is a senior executive editor overseeing tech industry reporting at Bloomberg News. He began his tech reporting career at Newsweek covering Silicon Valley and was later a technology correspondent for the New York Times before joining Bloomberg in 2010.

Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication -- the same school where he earned his PhD. Turow is the author of over 150 articles and 10 books including the recently published The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. He has some pointed critiques of how voice technology is used, what should change, and where we need further debate. We go point-by-point through many of these arguments and find both common ground and areas of disagreement I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion in part because so often I only hear people in our industry discuss the technology's benefits. I don't agree with all of Professor Turow's conclusions but I recognize that he is addressing a series of important questions that many people in the industry mostly ignore.

Ian Freed is co-founder and CEO of Bamboo Learning, the creators of award-winning Alexa skills for childhood education. As you know, 2020 changed everything in education and Bamboo is filling an interesting gap for in-home learning since 2018. Before Bamboo, Ian spent nearly 13 years at Amazon. While there he served in the coveted Tech Assistant to the CEO role where he was Jeff Bezos' shadow for a year. Afterward, Freed become Vice President of Kindle and then Vice President of Amazon Devices. While in the devices leadership role, the development and launch of Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Fire Phone all reported up to him. That is some unique insight for you today. We discuss Ed Tech, how COVID-19 and quarantine changed education, the early days of Echo and Alexa, and how the market has evolved.

Danny Tomsett is the founder and CEO of UneeQ. He founded the company in 2009. It was originally called FaceMe and was focused on video chat with humans for customer service. The idea was ahead of its time. Several years ago the company shifted to the virtual human solution at a time when conversational AI and visual rendering techniques were just coming into their own. UneeQ today is one of the leaders in software for creating virtual humans for customer contact centers, marketing, and other applications. The company may be best known for its digital einstein virtual human which you can interact with at digitalhumans.com.

Lauren Kunze became CEO of Pandorabots in 2013. However, her involvement with the company goes back to 2002. As a teenager she developed one of the first chatbots, Lauren bot, using the company's technology. So, Lauren has had a front row seat to the many phases of bot development. Twenty years' worth of insights. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and Neurobiology. Pandorabots has over a quarter of a million registered developers on its platforms, has been used to create more than 300,000 chatbots, and has managed 75 billion conversational interactions. They also have the award-winning Kuki virtual human.

Rob Hayes is head of product at Voiceflow. He spent the past 18 months helping transform the no-code builder for Alexa skills into a multi-platform design and prototyping solution for enterprise-grade conversational experiences. Today, Voiceflow has over 60,000 users of its software which offers some unique insights into trends for the conversation design and development communities. Prior to Voiceflow, Hayes had an independent product management consultancy. His work included a nine-month tour as interim head of product at Ada, the AI-backed chatbot company that recently achieved unicorn status after a $130 million funding round.

Amir Hirsh (CEO) and Gal Klein (CTO) are co-founders of Audioburst. We gathered in Clubhouse to discuss analyzing, segmenting, packaging and making talk audio content discoverable in real-time. Audioburst is doing this daily on millions of minutes of radio and podcast content and the same technology could be applied to social audio. We discuss how it could make social audio conversations more easily discoverable in the moment and enable the best elements of those discussions to be easily accessed afterward.

Spotify recently released a custom voice assistant called 'Hey Spotify,' acquired (then rebranded) Locker Room as the foundation of a new social audio feature, and announced a new in-car voice-interactive device for audio content while on the go. I gathered some Spotify experts in Clubhouse to break down Spotify's voice AI and social audio strategy and its implications. Guests include: Air Greenberg - Formerly head of voice marketing at Spotify Dave Kemp - Creator of Future Ear Radio Chris Messina - Former product leader at Google & Uber, one of the earliest U.S. users of Spotify Eric Schwartz - Head writer at Voicebot.ai

Dr. Patricia Scanlon is CEO and co-founder of SoapBox Labs, the leading company focused on voice recognition technology for children. Most voice recognition solutions today are optimized for adult speakers and have high error rates when applied to children's vocal patterns which are constrained by immature biological development and language proficiency. SoapBox Labs was created to fill this gap in ASR performance for kids. In today's interview, Scanlon discusses the EdTech market, the changing perceptions of venture capital related to the segment, new applications for speech recognition for children, and how COVID-19 has impacted the market. Dr. Patricia Scanlon earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and then went on to complete her PhD in speech recognition with a focus on signal processing and machine learning at the University College Dublin. Those studies included research at both Columbia University and IBM. That was followed by seven years on the research staff at Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent before founding SoapBox Labs.

Microsoft announced a $20 billion acquisition of Nuance this past week and Voicebot invited four experts in the field to help break down why the deal makes sense and what it means for the industry. Kavita Reddi is co-founder of Voxta, a provider of automated speech recognition technology for call centers and embedded products. Tom Hebner is vice president of Nueraflash and previously spent a dozen years as head of innovation for voice and AI technology at Nuance. Nate Treloar is co-founder and president of Orbita a leading provider of conversational AI technologies to healthcare providers. Paul Sweeney is co-founder and EVP of product at Webio a conversational AI middleware provider for contacts centers in financial services and collections.

Today, we talk voice-first games, other interactive audio content, and creating voice experiences for the smart speaker, smartphone, and in the car. Our guests have many years of successful game development for voice and on other platforms. Sarah Andrew Wilson is Chief Content Officer of Matchbox.io which is better known for its popular games voice games such as Question of the Day, Guess My Name, and Kids Quiz. Matchbox began building games as Alexa Skills and now also has a mobile app and podcast. We discuss that migration in today's discussion. Max Child is CEO and co-founder of Volley, a game maker that began with conversational experiences for messaging apps that went all-in on Alexa skill games and now also has a mobile app for its games and podcasts. Some of its well-known games include Song Quiz, Yes Sire, and Popcorn Tycoon. Doppio Games co-founder and CEO Jeferson Valadares has a long history in the gaming industry for mobile, console, and desktop that included executive roles at EA and Bandai Namco. Doppio is known for its Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant games The Vortex, The 3% Challenge, and Pac-Man Waka Waka. Rounding out our speaker roster is Niko Vuori, CEO of Drive.fm. The Drive.fm mobile app is built for commuters and offers a wide range of entertainment options including interactive quizzes such as the Drivetime show, Jeopardy which includes voice tracks from Alex Trebeck, and other audio entertainment. Niko is another games industry veteran having co-founded Rocket Games and holding past executive roles at ToyTalk and Zynga.

Per Ottosson is CEO of Artificial Solutions, the Sweden-based maker of Teneo software used for building custom chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational interfaces in over 80 languages. He joined the company in 2020 after a decade in leadership roles at IPSoft and two decades in enterprise software. Teneo is a popular software solution for contact centers that is also used for product integrations and marketing applications. The company's big focus of late has been its partnership with Microsoft which includes integration with the LUIS NLU and access to Teneo through the Azure cloud. We discuss where the industry has been, what's driving activity today, and where we are headed.

Tiny microphones and speakers are key enablers of the voice assistant revolution. From smart speakers to smart wireless earbuds (hearables), the audio components make it possible for voice assistants to communicate. Knowles Corporation is a leading supplier of these audio components for edge devices selling about $800 million in revenue annually. Brian Crannell is the SVP that oversees the development of audio solutions. He has been with Knowles for a decade, has degrees in mechanical engineering and law, and 25 years in consumer electronics.

Bahubali Shete founded TinyChef in 2016 (originally known as Klovechef) as an IoT-plus-voice interactive cooking experience and pivoted to an ML-based and software-only solution two years later. That move led to the company's Sanjeev Kapoor Recipes becoming the number one Alexa skill in India for cooking and the default first-party solution for Amazon in the country. TinyChef Alexa skills are also available in the U.S. and Canada and recently implemented the new Alexa Shopping Cart beta for in-skill voice commerce transactions. We discuss Shete's journey to 1 million users, the success of his voice commerce initiatives so far, and the behavior of users when employing voice apps for cooking and meal planning activities.

Aakrit Vaish is CEO and co-founder of Haptik an enterprise SaaS solution for building conversational AI-based intelligent assistants. The company's clients range from Samsung and Oyo to KFC, Coca-Cola, Club Mahindra, and Zurich Insurance. Haptik was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019 for $100 million. It has a large user base in customer service applications but has more recently expanded its offerings in conversational e-commerce. Haptik customers have managed over 2 billion conversations on 100 million devices. Vaish founded Hapitk in 2013 after several years as director of ops and the India business at Flurry, the leading mobile app analytics platform. He has an engineering degree from the University of Illinois.

Three guests join to share their social audio insights, how Clubhouse is evolving and approaches for using the social network. Mitch Joel (4:02) is well-known for the book and podcast both named Six Pixels of Separation. He is also a highly sought-after speaker on tech trends. Kate O'Neill (20:54) is author of Pixels in Place, a tech humanist, and an optimistic futurist. She is also a popular speaker at conferences and corporate events. Dr. Teri Fisher (39:30) is a sport and exercise physician, voice industry influencer, and creator of the Voice Den.

Three guests today share their Clubhouse experience and offer several strategies on how to get the most out of the new social audio network. Perspectives are shared from a voice AI tech startup founder, a tech event organizer, and venture capital investor. 5:02 - Monique Howard, Founder & CEO of Smarticles (mysmarticles.com) 18:43 - Tyler Crowley, Founder, Sthlm Tech Meetup / Week / Fest (sthlm.tech) 39:58 - Adriana Freitas, Partner at Muster Ventures and Deep Green Impact Ventures (musterventures.com)

Ilya Gelfenbeyn was the founding CEO of API.ai. He and his team were true pioneers in the voice AI industry and were rewarded for those efforts through an acquisition by Google in 2016. API.ai was the development environment that most of the first Google Actions were built upon along with tens of thousands of chatbots. It is better known today as Dialogflow after a rebranding in 2017, and is one of the most widely used solutions for building conversational AI experiences. What you may not know is that API.ai was preceded by Speaktoit which was known as the Siri of Android. Speaktoit amassed over 40 million users for the app-based virtual assistant. The experience taught the team a lot about the tooling required to deploy a successful conversational assistant. That ultimately led to the creation of developer tools and the pivot into API.ai which we discuss in today's interview. Gelfenbeyn later was a founding member of Google Assistant investments where he was involved in direct funding of several prominent voice AI startups. Today he leads an angel syndicate called The AI where he invests in AI-related companies.

Today we interview three active users of Clubhouse in our series around the rise of social audio. Vajresh Balaji is first with his analysis of total Clubhouse users and how the app has changed over the past six months. Laura Gassner Otting is a best-selling author of the book Limitless and corporate consultant. She also hosts some of the most popular rooms in Clubhouse. Our final guest is Adam Soccolich, the creator of The Best of Clubhouse newsletter and website. He offers insights on a variety of different ways users employ the app and highlights on the recent developments.

Jeremiah Owyang is tech analyst that is closely tracking the rise of social audio networks. In this week's interview, we discuss Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and some of the 25 other social audio startups he monitors. Jeremiah weighs in on six product categories that are growing up around social audio along with business models, monetization strategies, and predictions. We also evaluate the intersection of social audio and voice AI technology. Owyang is a founding partner of technology research firm Kaleido Insights. He previously worked as an analyst at Forrester and was a co-founder of Altimeter Group. He began his career as a UX designer and today is known for his work as a tech analyst, startup advisor, and angel investor.

Rachael Tatman has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington and began testing voice assistant speech recognition systems like Amazon Alexa from a research perspective in 2016. Today, Rachael is Senior Developer Advocate at open source conversational AI startup Rasa. She marries a deep computational and data science background with an understanding of linguistics to provide a unique view on conversational AI design and performance.

Vijay Balasubramaniyan is CEO of Pindrop, a leader in voice authentication technology for call centers. The interview was conducted on Clubhouse to discuss a new expansion of Pindrop to personalized consumer experiences such as media access on TiVo. Vijay co-founded Pindrop in 2011 after completing his PhD in computer science at Georgia Tech. Earlier in his career, Vijay was a research engineer at IBM and software engineer at Siemens and Intel. He first appeared on the Voicebot Podcast in Episode 86.

Hans van Dam began his career as a copywriter for science and technology companies and that role led him to become a chatbot designer in 2014. His experience working in conversational design led to the realization that few enterprises had a standard model for conversational user experience development nor did they have any idea how to staff a team for success. In 2018, Hans co-founded the Conversation Design Institute to establish processes, techniques, and organizational standards to professionalize the role of conversation design within large enterprises. Today we talk about the present and future of conversation design and how it will shape the future of conversational experiences.

Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon. He joined the Alexa team pre-launch in 2013 as director of machine learning before moving up to his current role in 2016. In our conversation, we discuss his long-time hope for Star Trek-like technologies, his initial impressions of Siri when it launched, his first day on the Alexa team, the reaction of early adopters, first-party versus third-party experiences, Alexa custom assistants, and much more. Prior to Amazon, Prasad spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon and BBN before its acquisition by Raytheon as a scientist working on speech and voice technologies mostly for government-funded projects. His graduate research at Illinois Institute of Technology focused on low bit-rate speech coding for wireless applications back in the late 1990s.

Cheryl Platz is the author of the new book "Design Beyond Devices, creating multimodal cross-device experiences" published by Rosenfeld. Platz is currently the principal UX designer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was on the core team that launched the Echo Look which was Amazon's attempt to inject Alexa into fashion selection. That was preceded by time working on Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant. She began her career as a game producer at EA and Griptonite. Platz is also a cast member and instructor for Unexpected Productions Seattle, an improv comedy troupe and earned a degree in computer science with a focus on human-computer interaction from Carnegie-Mellon University.

Here is Part 2 of our 2021 voice AI predictions. On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. Today, we go deeper with four guests that add some detail to their thinking around Voice AI in 2021. Topics covered include multimodal design, multimodal displays in healthcare, AI and ethics, voice on mobile, audio and Spotify. Malaika Paquiot, VP Product K4Connect - 4:10 Roger Kibbe, Senior Developer Evangelist Viv Labs/Samsung - 16:57 Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Head of User Research NLX - 34:30 Dave Kemp, Business Development Oaktree Products - 48:50

On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. We go a little deeper with four guests today that elaborate on their thinking in Part 1 of our 2021 voice AI predictions episodes. Topics covered include owned/custom voice assistants, first-party voice experiences, virtual humans, and the view of UX designers regarding voice. Nithya Thadani, CEO RAIN Agency - 4:02 Steve Tingiris, CEO Dabble Lab - 17:17 Amy Stapleton, Co-founder Chatables - 38:18 Jason Fields, Chief Strategy Officer Voicify - 53:38

Today, we have one last Voice AI Year in Review episode. This one is focused on what went down in India in 2020. Today's guests are some of the top Voice AI leaders in India and they share everything from what is happening in voice commerce, WhatsApp, and assistants on feature phones to how Indian consumers differ from the U.S. and much more. 3:24 - Aarkrit Vaish, founder and CEO of Haptik 18:40 - Kumar Rangarajan, Co-founder and CEO of Slang Labs 30:48 - Sarandeep Kaur, co-founder of Women in Voice in India, and conversational AI manager for Novo Nordisk 47:43 - Bahubali Shete, CEO of Klove Chef

Joe Petro is CTO and EVP of R&D for Nuance and has been with the company since 2009. Nuance is a voice giant doing $1.5 billion in annual revenue and has a valuation of over $12 billion today. For over a decade, Nuance essentially defined the voice industry holding many of its most significant patents and dominating several market sectors. Joe oversees an annual R&D budget of over $200 million including new features such as Ambient AI and a COVID-19 bot. Prior to Nuance, Joe was SVP of research and development at Eclipsys, an early leader in electronic medical records. He began his career as a systems engineer at EDS, has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in Computer-Aided Engineering.

Today we talk about voice AI adoption and trends in Europe for 2020. My guests include Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs, Dominik Meissner, co-founder of 169 Labs, and Alexis Hue, founder and managing director of Voxalyze. The guests provide a broad perspective given that Soapbox offers ASR tech for children in custom voice interactive experiences for education and entertainment, 169 Labs develops voice experiences for consumer brands and enterprises, and Voxalyze has a SaaS solution for voice app publishers looking to grow their audience. Today we discuss privacy, whether there is a voice assistant duopoly, custom assistants, voice and media, personalization, voice app developer disappointment, and much more all from a European perspective.

For 2020, we decided to have a voice developer-specific year-in-review episode to make sure we spent sufficient time focused on the events that were the most impactful for developers. We were lucky to get three very experienced guests to discuss topics ranging from voice on mobile and the rise of custom voice assistants to voice for customer support, the rise of audio, the hype/utility disconnect, messaging, COVID-19, and much more. Michael Myers is vice president of product and head of development at XAPPmedia. XAPP has brought more than 1200 Alexa skills and Google Actions live for several hundred companies. More recently, the company has introduced its machine teaching technologies for complex intent models and custom assistant development. Michael was honored as a Voicebot Top Leader in Voice for 2020 in the technologist category. Also joining us is Voicetech Carl. Carl Robinson is host of the Voicetech Podcast and CEO of Rumble Studio. He has hosted over 80 episodes of his own podcast but this week shares his thoughts as a guest commentator from his home in Paris. He talks a bit about Rumble Studio and its podcast interview automation technology as well as the news of the year. Carl was also honored as a Voicebot Top leader in Voice for 2020 in the influencer category. Steve Tingiris is CEO and founder of Dabble Lab, a leading developer of conversational AI-based experiences across numerous platforms. Dabble Lab has more than 200 YouTube video tutorials about developing voice interactive experiences on Alexa, Cortana, Twilio, Jovo, and more, with more than a million views combined. Steve is also a beta user of GPT-3 which we get into today.

This is Voicebot Podcast's fourth annual year-in-review episode. We discuss the year's top stories ranging from COVID, contact centers, and custom assistants to the voice AI shift to mobile and the convergence of chat and voice. Our guests joining the discussion include Tobias Dengel (CEO of Willowtree), Brielle Nickoloff (Head of product at Botmock), and Sarah Andrew Wilson (Chief Content Officer of Matchbox.io). This is the first of three year-in-review episodes. Upcoming are Developer and European perspectives.

Igor Jablokov is the founder and CEO of Pryon, a company that has set out to transform knowledge management in the enterprise with a self-training custom voice assistant that can easily integrate into multiple data sources and be deployed in hours. Pryon raised $20 million in 2019 led by Revolution after closing a $4.5 million seed round in late 2018. Jablokov is best known as the CEO of Yap, the company Amazon acquired to serve as the technical foundation of Alexa back in 2011. Earlier in his career, he spent 13 years in technical and management roles at IBM. He was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2013 and named a Top Leader in Voice for 2020 by Voicebot.