The Voicebot Podcast

James Chapman is VP and GM of music and wearables at Qualcomm, which means he oversees both hearables and smart watches. Qualcomm is a driving force behind the chips that make each subsequent hearable generation more powerful and more power-efficient. Chapman arrived at Qualcomm in 2015 as part of the $2.4 billion CSR acquisition where he oversaw 400 engineers and later led the company's auto, CE, and IoT segments. Before CSR, Chapman spent many years in engineering and product roles at Broadcom. Since arriving at Qualcomm, among other accomplishments, Chapman oversaw the rollout of the QCC1541 chip which is the workhorse of the true wireless earbuds market today. He earned a PhD in condensed particle physics from Oxford and has an MBA from Henley Business School.

Verbit just closed a $60M funding round after raising $30M earlier this year and $21M in 2019. We break down the company's AI-plus-human automated transcription business model, what is driving growth, and how the new funding will be employed. Tom Livne is CEO and co-founder of Verbit since 2017. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AppInsight. Tom is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Technion and earned a law degree at IDC Herzliya. He previously appeared in episode 89 of Voicebot Podcast in early 2019.

Dennis Crowley is co-founder and executive chairman of Foursquare, a pioneer in the rise of the mobile, local, and social apps famous for pioneering the venue check-in concept. Today, it supports popular consumer apps and a large enterprise business around consumer geolocation data. The company has 150,000 developer partners and says it powers location experiences for more than 1 billion people globally. Foursquare recently introduced Marsbot, an audio AR solution (i.e. a proactive walking assistant) that creates a reason to keep your hearables in all day when moving around a city or town. Marsbot harvests the nearly endless data from Foursquare's community and whispers nuggets of content to users as they go through specific locations. Crowley started out in the early dotcom days as a research analyst and then became known for organizing large scale games that integrated technology with real-world settings. He then founded Dodgeball which was location-based social software for mobile devices and was acquired by Google in 2005. That led to some time at Google as a product manager before co-founding Foursquare in 2009.

Kane Simms is co-founder of VUX World, a voice studio, design consultancy, and creator of a popular industry podcast and numerous LinkedIn videos. Today, we discuss voice user experience design and specifically cover some elements of VUX World's methodology when working with clients. We also review voice strategy, industry trends, and much more. Kane is an astute observer of the voice industry landscape and one of the technology's most effective champions.

Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-founder and CEO of SingularityNet, an open, decentralized platform for connecting and orchestrating interactions between artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents and other software. He has been a leader in the pursuit of AGI for over 20 years. Goertzel is also an innovator and researcher in NLP including a recent paper on unsupervised grammar induction. Earlier, Goertzel led the software team that produced the intelligence behind the world's most famous robot, Sophia, as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He is also chairman of OpenCog and of the Artificial General Intelligence Society. Dr. Goertzel earned a PhD in Mathematics from Temple University.

Dr. Dave Patterson earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at Ulster University where he also led an AI research lab. He also has degrees in computer science and biochemistry. Dave spent 15 years as a senior lecturer at Ulster University before leaving to become the founding CEO of Sophia, an advanced search technology company that helped online publishers match advertising to reader interests. In 2017, Sophia Search was acquired by Aiqudo where Dave and his team added NLU capabilities to the Aiqudo action engine. Today we talk about AI, NLU, NLP, semiotics and symbolic language representations, and much more. We break down how Aiqudo's architecture is different from other popular voice assistant platforms and how that enables higher efficiency in NLU training through unsupervised learning as well as semantic understanding accuracy.

Dr. Monica Lam joined Stanford University's computer science department in 1988 after earning a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-author of the textbook Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools, known as the Dragon Book. More recently she has been leading the Open Virtual Assistant initiative that has at its core, the Almond open source voice assistant. Today we talk about privacy, security, the need for choice of virtual assistants that are not controlled by 2 or 3 big companies, and the importance of reducing the cost of data annotation to make voice assistant development more accessible to a wider variety of organizations.

Phillip Hunter is the founder of CCAI Services where he helps companies develop voice user experiences using conversation AI and ML solutions. He previously was a vice president of Pulse Labs, head of user experience for Alexa Skills at Amazon, a Senior UX manager at AWS, a senior designer for Bing and Tellme while at Microsoft, a senior designer at 24-7.ai with a few more stops along the way during his career. He earned a degree in English from Texas A&M University. Today we discuss voice UX principles, Phillip's experience in the industry, and whether Alexa is living up to its promise.

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is CEO of Women in Voice an organization she founded in 2018. It has grown to 15 chapters in nine countries and has hosted over 80 events worldwide. Bajorek is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space and a sought-after conference speaker and 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 a PhD in speech language technology.

My guests today are long-time voice developers and well know leaders in the developer community. Mark Tucker is senior architect for voice technology at Soar.com and owner of Shazaml Design. He is also an Alexa Champion, Bixby Premiere Developer, and was named one of Voicebot's Top Leaders in Voice for 2019. He has a degree in Management Information Systems from Brigham Young University and 25 years of software development and architecture experience. Allen Firstenberg is project guru for Objective Consulting also with 25 years of software development experience. He earned a degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Allen is a Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant, IoT, Wearables, and other platforms. He first started developing for voice on Google Glass and then was one of the early developers on Google Assistant. Collectively Mark and Allen are the creators of the Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube channel where they go deep on topics of interest to voice developers.

Today I have another extra episode for you to discuss the announcements from Google's 2020 Fall product launch. We knew in advance that we would finally see a replacement for the Google Home which was launched four long years ago. The Nest Audio is that replacement as the flagship smart speaker for Google. Other than that, we were expecting a new Pixel smartphone, which we did see, and a new Chromecast, which also made an appearance. There wasn't much for the voice industry to sink their teeth into in terms of advances but I wanted to give you an update on what we did see and offer the perspectives of a couple of other event observers. To maintain consistency, I also asked Jefferson Graham of USA Today and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai to join me. They were both on the recent episode focused on the Amazon product launch so we are getting their hot takes today in contrast to what we saw from Amazon. Jefferson Graham is the leading consumer tech reporter in the U.S. and Eric Schwartz is the lead reporter at Voicebot.

Today's episode is all about Amazon's big 2020 product launch event. We break down what was announced, what will be successful, and what it says about Amazon's product strategy. First up today you will hear my conversation with Ben Fox Rubin of CNET. He covers Amazon exclusively and joins me for the second year in a row. Next, we have my interview with Katherine Prescott of VoiceBrew, the most popular newsletter for Alexa users. Then, I throw down again with Jefferson Graham of USA Today. He was on our extra episode 169 which offered a preview of the event. We call out whether his, and my, predictions were right, and what consumers are really going to adopt among the new device offerings. I wrap up with Eric Schwartz, the head writer for Voicebot.ai. He has some interesting insights into services Amazon is pushing to keep people connected.

Amazon's 2020 product launch is coming up in a few days so Jefferson Graham of USA Today joins me for a preview of what to expect from Amazon during this year's event. We also look back at the many 2019 announcements and discuss which ones look like a success and which not so much. We talk about video, smart displays, smart TVs, Echo Frames (smart glasses), Echo Dot with clock, and more. It's your perfect companion for anticipating the 2020 launch even news. Jefferson Graham is the leading consumer tech journalist in the U.S. He has been a technology columnist for USA Today for the past twenty years and before that spent several years as the Tech Editor for Hollywood Reporter. In addition to being a columnist, Jeff writes the weekly Talking Tech newsletter and more impressively has published more than 1,500 episodes of the Talking Tech Podcast, which he records every day.

James Vlahos is the founder of Hereafter AI, a company that enables anyone to create a chatbot avatar of a real person. James' interest in chatbots started in the 1980s on a Commodore PET computer and was rekindled in 2015 when, as a reporter, he wrote a story about PullString's work on Hello Barbie. That led to him creating Dadbot, a chatbot that captured the memories and thoughts of his father that at the time was battling Stage IV cancer. After completing a book on tech's many decades of voice assistant innovation called Talk to Me, James founded Hereafter AI in 2019. We discuss what he learned from his early experience with rudimentary chabot designs of the 1980s and how his experience building a chatbot to memorialize his father offered unique insights into the tradeoffs of these types of endeavors. We cover a series of questions James has not been asked before and he offers some interesting insights that will be of value to any voice assistant designer. James earned a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over his career, he has written for many publications including The New York Times, GQ, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic Adventure, and WIRED.

TalkSocket just launched a Kickstarter for a physical product that makes Alexa (and other voice assistants) instantly accessible hands-free on any iPhone or Android smartphone. We talk about the product launch, the technical approach, the partnering strategy, and even how the company expects to eventually expand capabilities to China for Alibaba's and Baidu's voice assistants. Today's guests are Andrew Delorenzo and Chandler Murch, the co-founders of TalkSocket, a hardware device that makes Alexa hands free on iPhone and Android. It's a non-obvious innovation, but one that just might have the right ingredients for widespread consumer adoption. Delorenzo is CEO and has nearly a decade working in the cloud hosting business for AWS, Tencent, and Joyent. Murch is CTO for TalkSocket and has a background in IT management for companies such as game maker Valve and Ed Tech pioneer Promethean.

Ian Bicking spent 10 years at Mozilla as a software developer, engineering manager, and research engineer. His last project there was Firefox Voice, a custom voice assistant for the Firefox Browser. That experience led him to record his observations on the state of voice technology and conversational AI from a developer's perspective which he recorded in a 3,300-word blog post. Today, we discuss Bicking's 12-month journey building a custom voice assistant and what he learned. Before Mozilla, Bicking spent several years as a senior programmer at the Open Planning Project. He earned degrees in computer science and mathematics at Earlham College.

Richard Weeks is head of conversational experiences at U.S. Bank. The company has an Alexa Skill, Google Action, chatbot, and a newly minted custom assistant now available through its mobile app. Today, we talk about what U.S. Bank has learned about voice and conversational user experiences and how that influenced the decision to launch a custom assistant. We also talk about his organization, the tech stack, objectives, and more. Richard has been with U.S. Bank for the past four years after nearly 23 years with Wells Fargo where he concluded his tenure as Senior Vice President for customer experience strategy after holding many leadership roles in product management. Richard earned an undergraduate degree from USC and an MBA from the University of San Francisco.

Jeanine Heck is vice president of AI product at Comcast, the top cable television provider in the U.S. with over 20 million subscribers for its Xfinity service. The company began shipping a voice-interactive TV remote app in 2013 and a voice-controlled physical remote for its cable boxes in 2015. In 2019, the Xfinity voice remote handled over 12 billion voice requests which suggests users are making an average of about 600 voice requests per year, up from about 200 three years ago. It is a heavily used custom assistant that has been proven at scale. Heck joined Comcast in 2007 and has overseen the Xfinity voice remote project since its inception in 2013. Earlier in her career, she was a programmer and then manager at Gemini systems. Heck earned a degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia.

Dor Skuler is CEO and co-founder of Initiation Robotics. He is a former board director for ClearPath Networks, Senior Vice President at Alcatel-Lucent, and officer in the IDF. Intuition Robotics was formed in 2015 to reimagine the relationship between humans and machines. The company's first product, ElliQ, is an interactive smart speaker for elder adults. It can respond to requests or proactively engage with users, has a screen, and can move to offer the robotic equivalent of body language. The solution is in beta testing today and the company has been collecting user data before a commercial launch. Toyota also recently tapped Intuition Robotics to provide its Q voice assistant designed for automotive use cases. The company recently closed a $36 million funding round and has raised $58 million to date.

This week's roundtable discussion focuses on the top voice AI news from the first half of 2020. We, of course, talk about COVID-19 and how that is changing adoption patterns or the industry, smart speaker adoption figures, the voice app ecosystems and whether there is a voice app winter underway, and the rise of custom assistants, a shift to mobile and more. Guests this week include Theo Lau, founder of Unconventional Ventures, Katherine Prescott, founder of VoiceBrew, and Jan König, co-founder of Jovo.

Harjinder Sandhu founded Saykara in 2015 but his journey into healthcare and voice began in 2000 when he founded Medremote which used speech recognition and machine learning to automate physician notes transcription for medical documentation. That company was eventually acquired by Nuance in 2006 and Sandhu stayed on as the healthcare group CTO until 2011. He then was a co-founder of a patient engagement platform called Twistle which is still operating today. But, the draw of voice technology advances led him to Saykara where he and his team are building a voice assistant for doctors and other clinicians. It's a great conversation about specialty assistants, the importance of workflow in healthcare, and the tech stack required to serve this highly demanding user base. Sandhu earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and was a professor of computer science at York University before becoming a startup founder.

Todd Mozer is founder, Chairman, and CEO of Sensory. The company has provided voice and AI technology for 3 billion devices over 25 years. Sensory's technology stack can be used to deploy a custom assistant in an appliance or mobile app and also has individual features for wake word, biometric login, and more. Sensory customers include Amazon, AT&T, Garmin, Google, GoPro, Huawei, Motorola, and Sony to name a few. Todd is a graduate of Stanford Business School and UC Santa Barbara. He also studied computer science at UC Berkeley in between.

Peter Durlach started out in Audiology technology in the 1980s and then quickly transitioned to speech technology in 1988 at Articulate Systems which was acquired by Lernout and Hauspie in 1999. He then moved on to lead Unveil Technologies, a pioneer in the contact center segment. Eventually, Durlach wound up at Nuance twice with a brief interlude at the hospital system UPMC. Today, Durlach leads Nuance's $1 billion healthcare business which includes solutions used by over 85% of radiologists and 65% of physicians that incorporate speech recognition, dictation, and custom assistants into their daily practice activities. In our conversation, we discuss Pete's three decades in the speech and voice technology, building custom assistants, and where voice is and will be making a big difference in healthcare.

Scott Stephenson is cofounder and CEO of Deepgram. He earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Michigan with a focus on Machine Learning. He then spent time building a system designed to detect dark matter two miles underground. That experience inadvertently introduced Scott and a colleague to the limitations of speech recognition systems which to their surprise were not using the same deep learning architecture with hardware acceleration they had built to detect dark matter activity. It ultimately led to founding Deepgram in 2015 as a new model for automated speech recognition. The company added 12 million in funding in March of 2020.

Alan Nichol co-founded Rasa in December 2016. Rasa began life as an open source NLU for chatbots and has expanded to other features, including voice interactivity. The company raised $13 million in venture funding in 2019 and came back about twelve months later with a $26 million funding round in 2020 after showing strong growth numbers in both open source downloads and new enterprise clients. Nichol is CTO at Rasa and before that was co-founder and CTO of a Techstars-backed productivity startup that had a conversational angle. He earned a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge with a machine learning focus. He also has an advanced degree in chemical physics from the University of Edinburgh. Today, we talk about the conversational AI stack, chatbots, voice, open source, and where we are headed with custom assistants.

Punit Soni is founder and CEO of Suki. The company provides a specialty voice assistant for doctors and other clinicians and he elaborates how its features go beyond the earlier technologies associated with medical dictation and transcription. The company was founded in 2017 and has raised more than $40 million since that time. Earlier, Punit was Chief Product Officer at Flipkart and Vice President of Product Management at Motorola while it was a division of Google. At Motorola, he oversaw the rollout of Moto X which was one of the first smartphones to include a voice assistant. He was also a Lead Product Manager at Google and began his career as a software engineer. Soni earned an MBA from Wharton and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wyoming.

Mike Zagorsek is vice president of product marketing at SoundHound. Prior to SoundHound, Zagorsek was head of product marketing at Square and Leap Motion, and before that was Director of Interactive at Apple. Way back in 1999, he was a Manager at Sapient where he helped companies enter the digital age much like he is now ushering them into the voice age. SoundHound is a leading white label solution for building custom voice assistants and has made news recently for powering Snapchat's new assistant. In today's interview, we discuss that implementation along with Pandora, Mercedes, and others.

Voice at Swisscom began in 2015 with a voice interactive TV remote. The voice assistant Hey Swisscom emerged five years later in November 2019. Misha Zivkovic and Riccardo Lopetrone learned a lot in both versions of their voice-enabled products and they share the details behind the voice assistant in today's extended discussion. Do you think you could design and build a custom assistant in 9 months? Swisscom just did. We discuss their journey with voice, tech stack, objectives, and more. Misha Zivkovic is Program Manager for voice at Swisscom and Riccardo Lopetrone is Senior Product Manager for Voice, a role he began in 2015.

Andy Webb is head of product for voice and AI at BBC Worldwide as VP of Product Strategy. BBC has been a pioneer in supporting consumer assistants globally such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. It is prominent in the UK but also provides skills and Actions in many other countries as well. It is also one of the most respected news organizations worldwide so Amazon and Google are incentivized to make sure BBC is available through there assistants. Last August, BBC announced it would create a new voice assistant of its own called Beeb. The organization is not abandoning Alexa or Google Assistant. Instead, Webb tells me that they are supplementing their work on these platforms. Beeb is more than an assistant. It's BBC's own internal conversational engine that can enable custom assistants deployed through desktop and mobile apps as well as support the many voice assistants that want access to BBC content. Media is one of the most popular and most important segments for voice assistants today. BBC is developing the Beeb to offer richer functionality than you could ever provide on the general-purpose consumer assistant platforms because of the limitations they impose on third-parties. Andy Webb joined BBC in 2106 and has been head of the voice and AI group since it was formed in 2017. Before his time at BBC, Webb was EMEA regional manager for Imagine Communications, head of product management for digital platforms at Arqiva and Product Development lead at Sky among other roles.

My guest today is Ramu Sunkara, co-founder and CEO of Alan AI. In 2014, Ramu co-founded a company called Synqq which was a voice assistant for meetings. Sometimes startups are for learning. Synqq educated Ramu and his co-founder that enterprises truly needed voice for enterprise apps. That led to the creation of Alan AI which has been his focus since 2017. Earlier in his career, Ramu was co-founder and CEO of Qik which was a video streaming solution for mobile and was acquired by Skype in 2011. Before that, he spent 11 years at Oracle, serving in, among other roles, vice president of e-Business suite technology, and vice president of real-time collaboration technologies. Ramu was trained as a software engineer and holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and earned an MBA at Boston University.

Over the past few weeks, I have brought in executives from three companies with specialty assistants that have shown early promise: Deutsche Telekom, Josh.ai, and Aider. Today, we take a different angle on this topic and focus specifically on the design of specialty assistants. And, we invited a crew that has worked on multiple specialty assistants over the past few years. My guests are Christophe Esslinger, Mohamed Hassan. and Dr. Barbara Baumeister all from VUI Agency in Germany. Christophe is Director of VUI Agency and a co-founder. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Mannheim and later was a co-founder of Botflux, a chatbot technology and UX design firm. He launched VUI Agency in 2017. Hassan is a Voice AI Experience Architect and design lead. Before VUI he worked at Denkwerk in Cologne as a senior experience designer, also working primarily in voice interactive solutions. He has a master's degree in integrated design from the Koln International School of Design and is studying for his PhD. Barbara is Voice Architect with previous experience working on Cortana at Microsoft and has a PhD in phonetics and language processing from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. We cover a wide range of topics from their work with Swisscom and other companies defining voice assistant personas, establishing a structured voice assistant design process, working with internal client teams, and much more.

Brendan Roberts founded Aider in 2017 after more than 15 years helping small businesses with their communications and IT needs. Roberts hacked together a specialty voice assistant using off-the-shelf technologies in 2017 to prove that it could help address common problems faced by small businesses. He then launched Aider as a specialty assistant for small business managers more than a year ago in New Zealand and Australia and then in July expanded to North America. Aider helps small businesses by integrating with a variety of third-party solutions they already use today ranging from accounting to inventory and marketing. The assistant makes it easier to access the information in those systems today and soon will also enable the execution of voice-directed actions. The assistant can be accessed via the Aider mobile app or through popular general-purpose assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. In December, the company closed a seed round of funding which included Coca-Cola's investment arm. Previously, Brendan was a co-founder of 9 Spokes an IT services company in New Zealand. Before that he spent many years in telecom at Vodaphone in New Zealand and Carphone Warehouse in London. We talk getting started, the role for specialty assistants, build or buy decisions for technology, managing through COVID when you see your customer's revenues fall off a cliff before they do, and more.

Alex Capecelatro and his co-founder started Josh.ai in 2015 though the technology development preceded that by almost five years. Josh.ai is solely focused on creating assistant-enabled luxury home automation that supports both touch and voice interaction but Alex tells me it can go much further in the market as well. The company has its own smart speakers, its own assistant and enough momentum to recently raise $11 million from investors on top of an earlier round of $8 million. Alex previously was founder of Yeti which was acquired in 2015. Earlier in his career, he was a research scientist and earned a degree in materials science and engineering from UCLA.

You know about Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant. What about the German alternative from Deutsche Telekom, Hallo Magenta? You are going to learn a lot today from Reghu Thanumalayan, Innovation Lead for Deutsche Telekom's Hallo Magenta Voice Assistant. He led the technology team that brought Magenta to market in 2019. Reghu shares insights about what Magenta does, how consumers are using the smart speaker today, the integration with Alexa, and even how it is enabling others to build their own enterprise assistants. We cover a lot of ground today. Before Telekom, Reghu was VP of software engineering at SAP for more than a decade.

As we shift into an era of voice there is an open question about where we will get all that content required for audio responses to voice queries. Trinity Audio's Ron Jaworski has a simple answer: convert millions of pages of website and other text content into audio instantly using text-to-speech. This is a really interesting and broader discussion than you might think. TTS on webpages is a gateway to several interesting integrations of voice with our visual digital world as it is today. Ron Jaworski is co-founder and CEO of Trinity Audio, a company determined in Ron's words, to audiofy, the world wide web. They have an audio player you can install on your website that will make the content listenable using TTS. However, they go beyond this by understanding context and creating an approach for delivering more than just page content and increasing time on page. Prior to founding Trinity, he was CEO of Meme Global Media. Today we talk audio content, voice assistants, and the building blocks of a new tech platform.

Many people have been stuck inside for the past several weeks and some are trying out voice games to pass the time or just explore the latest developments in voice-interactive entertainment. Two games that have gotten a good deal of attention are The Vortex and the 3% Challenge, both from Doppio Games. These offer different examples of how to implement a game strategy on the leading voice platforms and serve as a jumping-off point for the conversation today with Jeferson Valadares, the co-founder and CEO of Doppio Games. We discuss these games in depth, how they differ creatively and from a business model standpoint. We also talk about monetization strategies, how voice revenue models differ from mobile and other gaming platforms and much more. Jeferson brings a deep background in game development to Doppio. He is a member of the Board of Directors at Rovio Entertainment was formerly VP/GM of the BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment and also spent time at top tier game studios such as EA, BioWare, and Digital Chocolate.

Tal Wanderow is CEO of Vocalis. He and host Bret Kinsella discuss the latest progress behind employing vocal biomarkers to evaluate health conditions and risks. We go into detail about the current work behind tools for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 patients. We even explore the ethics of what data patients should have a right to access. Vocalis Health is focused on using vocal biomarkers to identify the likelihood of hospitalization for a variety of conditions and have another product focused on respiratory disease detection and monitoring. Given that background, it's not surprising that the company has taken a prominent role in the healthcare industry response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The topic today is voice assistant adoption in the car. It is rising quickly according to data from a recent report by Voicebot. My guest to discuss the trends behind drivers and voice is Sanjay Dhawan of Cerence, the spin-out of Nuance Automotive that since last October has been an independent publicly-traded company. Cerence has voice technology in over 300 million automobiles on the road today. So, Sanjay and his team have a lot of insight into where the industry has been, where it is now and where it's headed. You have a couple of options to follow along with this episode. First, there is a video of the interview with the charts available at Voicebot.ai/webinars. Second, you can download the full In-car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report 2020 at no cost by going to Voicebot.ai/research.

Meredith is a media powerhouse that reaches over 180 million people with some of the top brands in publishing including People Magazine, Allrecipes, Entertainment Weekly, Travel + Leisure, Food and Wine, Instyle, Real Simple, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens and dozens of other brands. In addition, Meredith operates 17 local television stations in 12 U.S. media markets. Meredith has invested in voice enabling several magazine titles and is expanding support for Amazon Alexa skills. In our conversation, we discuss Meredith's Entertainment Weekly Alexa skill, the new Real Simple meditation skill, Allrecipes, corporate voice strategy, and more. My guest is Rachel Reed, Senior Innovation Manager at Meredith. Earlier in her career, Rachel was a marketing manager at Time Inc. and also worked at Pallisades Media Ventures, Burson Marsteller, and Johns Hopkins University.

Pandemics have broad impact and the voice industry is no exception to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Today's discussion focuses on the intersection of the tech and voice industries and the rise of coronavirus. Joining Bret Kinsella are three guests that are analyzing the coronavirus pandemic closely. Rani Molla is the lead data reporter for Recode and Vox where she writes about tech and how data sheds light on what is really going on. David Watkins is an expert in the global consumer electronics supply chain which includes coverage of many smart devices including smart speakers. Ben Fox Rubin is the lead reporter on Amazon for CNET and speaks to the recent surge in online orders and the company's plans to hire 100,000 new workers in the U.S. to meet demand.

Coronavirus COVID-19 is now officially a global pandemic but it has been impacting events where the voice industry has a prominent role for nearly a month. MWC, HIMSS, SXSW all canceled. What other events are likely to face a similar fate? How is the industry already adjusting to new challenges associated with large gatherings? Peter Erickson and Bradley Metrock run the largest and most popular events in catering to the voice industry globally. Erickson has already had two events canceled due to coronavirus but has online events already on the calendar that are getting a lot of attention. Metrock also had some online events planned but also has the Voice of the Car Summit planned for April. We discuss how the CEOs of Modev and Score Publishing view the current situation, how they are adjusting, and what it portends for the future. Enjoy this special edition of the Voicebot Podcast.

Michal Stanislawek has nearly 20 years of experience in broadcast and online media. He co-founded Utter One in 2019 and quickly launched one of the most popular games on Google Assistant in Poland. That along with another title launched in the fall of 2019 serve over 100k users per month. The team has also launched a media-oriented Alexa skill and has a new Bixby Capsule in certification. In addition to Utter One Michal is also head of product development at MediaATMOS supporting premium live broadcast video around the world. He was formerly vice president of broadcast platforms at Deluxe MediaCloud where he built an award-winning media asset management and orchestration platform. He has been awarded MVP by Microsoft for two years running. Michal earned a Masters degree in engineering from Lublin University of Technology. We discuss how he initially went to market with his voice games, what he learned, and how he is moving forward with advertising monetization and creating new voice interactive media experiences. And, we discuss the future of media in the voice era. Enjoy!

Ben Sauer is a designer with deep experience as a practitioner, trainer, and theorist around conversational design. He recently left a role as a product and design leader at Babylon Health in the UK which has recently launched a chatbot that serves patients on behalf of the National Health Service. He has also been a trainer for O'Reilly events, is a frequent conference speaker, and has worked with BBC, Pearson, and Tesco in their conversational design initiatives. He has a degree in English Literature from the University of Warwick. We discuss conversational design in healthcare and for other applications, what he has learned, and how voice is changing the way people are thinking about brand trust.

What3Words is a global address system that has assigned three-word labels to all of the 57 million 3-meter squares that make up the surface of the earth. That approach enables you to go to the front door of house, the side door of an office building, the middle of city block, a specific tree in a park, or even a remote jungle location. It offers precision in space that is far superior to our postal address system and is more accessible than GPS coordinates. Chris Sheldrick, CEO and co-founder of What3Words, discusses the origin behind the solution, his work in the automotive, transportation, and government sectors and how the approach aligns well with the rise of voice assistants.

David Cannington is co-founder of Nuheara, a pioneer in the hearables, wireless earbuds market. Nuheara was founded in 2015 in Perth, Australia and delivered its first product in 2017. The company recently announced a new generation product at CES, the IQ Buds Max. David and his co-founder previously worked together at Sensear which provided noise reduction gear for high noise manufacturing environments.

My two guests today are widely sought after experts in voice user experience design. After more than 20 years designing voice user interfaces, Cathy Pearl is well known in the industry and is the author of what many people see as the key handbook for voice application design, "Designing Voice User Interfaces." Cathy currently serves as head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google. Prior to Google, Cathy was vice president of user experience at Sensely and before that worked at Nuance, Tellme, and Volio. She holds degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science and worked for NASA early in her career. Adva Levin is founder of Pretzel Labs, an award-winning voice interaction studio best known for winning the top prize in the Alexa skills competition for Kids skills in 2018. Other popular titles by Pretzel labs include Freeze Dancers and Kids Bop Daily. Pretzel Labs also works with brands, media companies and government ministries on voice user experience design. Adva is an Alexa Champion, has undergraduate degrees in Math and Economics, and a Masters in Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University. Adva first joined me on Voicebot Podcast back in Episode 49 in June 2018 and Cathy preceded here by a few months in Episode 30 two years ago this month.

Today, we have an in-depth discussion about voice technology adoption in healthcare, what some trials of new applications are showing, and where we are headed. Dr. Teri Fisher of VoiceFirst Health and the Alexa in Canada podcasts is currently a full-time Sports and Exercise Physician and clinical assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. In addition to his clinical medical practice, Dr. Fisher has become a leading authority on the intersection of healthcare and voice technology. Also with us is Nate Treloar, co-founder and chief operating officer of Orbita, a software company focused on bringing voice assistants into patient-facing use cases. Nate is a respected expert and speaker on search, text, and data mining and has advised many of the world's largest companies and government agencies. His work at Orbita takes him into leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic and many others to support patient use cases before care, during care, and post-procedure. This interview was recorded onsite at Project Voice in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The National Football League (NFL) in the U.S. is the top sports league by revenue globally. It is also a media powerhouse that has been experimenting with voice assistant technology to enhance the fan experience. Joining Voicebot Podcast host Bret Kinsella today is Ian Campbell from NFL Labs, the innovation arm of the NFL. He has worked in product design, UX and innovation for the past two years in his second tour with the NFL. Earlier in his career, Ian was director of creative and UX for NFL.com and the various football and fantasy football mobile apps of the league. He has also worked previously at Phenomenon, DeviantArt, GolinHarris, and Digitas. Also joining us is John Gillilan, founder of Bondad.fm, who has been working with the NFL on its voice initiatives. John is a creative voice designer and Alexa Champion that previously worked at Disney, Maker Studios, and KUFALA Recordings. He was also co-founder of Vosotros, an independent music distribution company where he executive produced 10 albums with 100+ musicians. Ian and John walked through an interesting presentation at Project Voice where they went through the backstory behind The Rookie's Guide to the NFL Alexa skill and Flash Briefing. They also discussed the overall strategy and design considerations as well as some projects that are not yet public but are available today to NFL employees. We discuss a wide range of topics including the use of avatars, multimodal design and how to think about mobile devices differently that smart speakers and smart displays. Enjoyl

Healthcare will be a big adopter of voice technology and voice assistants. Mayo Clinic is out front innovating around new and intriguing use cases which we discuss in today's show. Dr. Sandhya Pruthi is a physician at Mayo Clinic focused on breast cancer treatment and research and a frequent speaker on voice technology. She is the current president and board of trustees member of the National Consortium of breast centers among several other industry recognitions. Joyce Even is Vice Chair of Global Business Solutions, Content Management and Delivery at Mayo Clinic where she oversees a variety of initiatives related to medical and health content dissemination as part of the Clinic's mission to serve its local and global communities. Joyce is a CPA with a background in accounting, an MBA, and also holds a degree in Nursing.

We have 10 interviews from the floor of CES 2020 offering the latest insights on voice assistants, voice services, and what to expect over the next year. Gal Klein, CTO and co-founder of Audioburst (4:28) Audrey Arbeeney, founder and CEO of Audiobrain (11:50) Pat Higbie CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia (22:01) Tobias Dengel CEO of WillowTree (28:30) Dr. Martyn Farrow, COO of Soapbox Labs (37:40) Nithya Thadani, CEO of RAIN (44:18) Joel Sucherman from NPR (52:46) David Cannington, co-founder of Nuheara (1:02:50) Jonathan Bradley, from Kohler (1:10:51) Robert Keating Safe-Tec (1:14:31)