The Voicebot Podcast

As promised, today I have part 2 of our 2020 predictions shows. Today, we take a deep dive into multiple conversations about voice app architecture. This is important because it determines how we develop for voice and what governs user experience. I have three guests today that will break down for you what they expect to change in 2020. John Kelvie from Bespoken joins us from Peru and marks a return to the podcast to talk about how "domains" will replace voice apps. He is followed by Tim McElreath from Discovery and Food Network who discusses his prediction about the "de-appification" of Alexa skills and Assistant agents. We conclude with a conversation with Voiceflow's Braden Ream and his theory about the rise of "intentless" voice apps. This episode finishes up our series that brings you insights from voice AI leaders in six countries on four continents. Enjoy!

Today we have part 1 of a two-part series on 2020 predictions with guests from Australia, the UK, and Holland. I want to give a shoutout to all of the Voice Insider subscribers that offered their predictions for 2020. We had 46 of them in all and you can read the full story at Voicebot.ai. Today, I have 3 of them on the mic to elaborate on their predictions and we will have three more in the next episode. We start this week with the view from Asia and Australia from Matt Ware of First, a leading digital and voice agency. He has predictions about the rise of Asia in voice and what will happen with discovery on the leading platforms this year. Next we talk Apple and Siri with Katy Bass of Altavox in the UK. Will there be a Siri OS? Will Apple do something meaningful with Siri in 2020? Katy shares her perspective. We wrap up Part 1 with Maarten Lens-FitzGerald who joins us from Holland and discusses the single word that will describe the sentiment around voice in 2020. We even score whether his 2019 prediction came to pass. Is there a voice winter? Maarten has some thoughts on that too. Enjoy!

Patricia Scanlon is CEO and founder of Soapbox Labs, the leader in automated speech recognition for kids. You may have observed a child attempting to use an Alexa or Google Assistant device and noticed the success rate of those interactions was noticeably lower than when you use it. A big part of that is due to the fact that the speech recognition models in leading voice assistants are tuned toward adult speech patterns, tone, and enunciation. Scanlon points out that children have shorter and thinner vocal cords and have often not learned how to enunciate properly. That means the speech recognition models tuned for adults are looking for the wrong cues when attempting to discern speech from children and the poor results are predictable. Scanlon began noticing this problem in 2012 and 13 and decided to set out to solve the problem. That has led Soapbox into both the Education Tech and Toys and Games markets. Today we discuss the technology and the applications related to speech recognition for children and even how her company is moving toward developing entirely edge-based solutions with large vocabulary voice recognition that never needs to send data to the cloud. We go deep and wide on this topic that gets too little attention but is likely to shape the experiences of the generation of children born from this point forward. Scanlon earned her PhD in speech recognition with a focus in signal processing and machine learning at the University College Dublin. She also has an undergraduate degree in electrical and electronics engineering. Before founding Soapbox in 2013, Scanlon worked for seven years as a researcher at Bell Labs of Alcatel Lucent.

2019 started out with unbounded optimism around voice technology with rapid smart speaker adoption and Google announcing over 1 billion devices supported the Assistant. It continued with Microsoft pulling Cortana from consumer use case and Samsung adding new capabilities to Bixby while Amazon and Google rapidly expanded features. Then, we had the negative stories about contractors listening to voice assistant conversations and threats of new security vulnerabilities for smart speakers. The year is concluding with new products and continued robust sales of everything with a voice assistant. Milkana Brace, CEO of Jargon, Ravi Lal, CEO of Voxly Digital, and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai join host Bret Kinsella breaking down the stories from 2019 and discussing what mattered and what didn't over the past year.

What are hearables? They are wireless earbuds and headphones that provide always-available voice assistant access. Think AirPods, Pixel Buds, Echo Buds, Galaxy buds. At home, you have an always-listening smart speaker but on the go having that just in your phone is a bit limiting. Connecting the voice assistant from a smartphone to your ears creates a more efficient and private interaction. Today we talk about the technology underlying hearables and why we aren't getting 12-hour, all-day battery life. We also discuss applications, consumer adoption, and how the big players intend to compete. 2020 is going to see a lot more hearables action driven by new apps and new products such as AirPods Pro and Amazon Echo Buds. Dave Kemp works for Oaktree products, the leading U.S. distributor of hearing aids and an expert in the hearables space ranging from prescription solutions to consumer products such as AirPods. He is also a contributor to Voicebot.ai on hearables topics and has his own regular podcast and blog called Future Ear. Also, with us is Andy Bellavia. He has a long tenure in the sound and hearing market with past work for consumer hearables innovator Bragi, hearing aid tech company Nuheara and currently as a BD lead for Knowles Corp. — a company that has components in the new Amazon Echo Buds.

Privacy and security issues associated with voice assistants have been the biggest stories in the industry so far in 2019. Joining host Bret Kinsella are Rani Molla, the lead data reporter for Recode, Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory, and Martin Lens-FitzGerald of Open Voice and several other voice-related projects. Molla offers the media perspective, Mozer a 25 year veteran of the industry with in-depth knowledge of privacy and security issues offers some unique insights and Lens-FitzGerald tackles the questions from a European viewpoint. It's a holiday season discussion focused on whether consumers actually care about the intersection of voice assistants, privacy, and security and where we are headed.

Jeff McMahon is CEO and co-founder of Voicify a voice app development platform designed for enterprise marketers. After a career in digital marketing as an agency founder, Jeff and his co-founders saw the need for voice app software that would integrate well with the existing marketing technology stack and be designed for how marketers perform their jobs. We talk about development, day-to-day use, and the many integrations enterprise marketers expect. In addition to his work at Voicify, Jeff is also managing partner of Martech Ventures and investment firm focused on marketing technology. Earlier in his career, he was a board member and Chief Strategy Officer at digital consultancy Rightpoint and founder and CEO of Oasis Technology Partners, an interactive marketing agency. Jeff earned a BA in neuroscience from Hamilton College and an MBA from Cornell.

Tom Hewitson is CEO and founder of Labworks.io, a voice app studio in London known from some of the most popular games on Alexa such as Would You Rather, Trivia Hero, True or False and Mental Samurai hosted by actor Rob Lowe. In this week's episode, Tom offers 10 Hot Takes from 2.5 Years in voice based on his presentation at the All About Voice Conference in Munich. He touches on some controversial topics such as lack of discovery, how closed platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant stifle innovation, the lack of return on multimodal efforts, too much focus on persona, and lack of monetization. It's a rare dose of unvarnished honesty from a voice developer in a public forum. Tom Hewitson founded Labworks in 2016 as a chatbot consultancy but shifted into voice apps about a year later. Before Labworks, Tom worked as a freelance journalist and a content designer. He spent time as a digital editor for Lonely Planet and a content strategist at Facebook. He earned an M.S. in political journalism and TV production from City University London and an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Sussex.

Four independent developers discuss their experience building for Samsung Bixby and react to announcements from Samsung Developer Conference 2019, including Bixby Views, templates and working with the IDE. The interviews are conducted onsite at the San Jose Convention Center at SDC19. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Cory Wixom of Baby Stats, Piyush Hari of Dilli Labs, Lei Xiang from Volley, and Ryan Weiss of Home Advisor.

This week we have four interviews conducted onsite at ConverCon in Dublin in October 2019. First up is Katie McMahon, GM of SoundHound, a leading custom voice assistant development platform, and my guest on Episode #1 of the Voicebot Podcast. Next in line is Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs. Soapbox is a pioneer around speech recognition for children. Then we have Dustin Coates, the voice search lead at Algolia, a leader in enterprise search. We finish up with Mr. ConverCon himself, Paul Sweeney. He is a co-founder of Webio and is on the front lines launching conversational products for contact centers. Paul also is one of the key organizers of ConverCon which just completed its third year.

Dr. Larry Heck is CEO of Viv Labs and a Senior Vice President at Samsung. In that role, he oversees all things Bixby. Prior to his work with Bixby, Larry served as head of Samsung's Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Center. He has a deep background and distinguished career in both voice and AI technologies. Prior to Samsung, he was a Research Director at Google leading the Deep Dialogue project. Earlier in his career, he was chief scientist for Microsoft Speech, a Vice President of R&D at Nuance, and a Senior Research Engineer at SRI International. Larry earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Texas Tech and his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.

Sanjay Dhawan is CEO of Cerence, the recent spin-out company from what used to be known as Nuance Automotive. On October 1st it became a separate company and currently has a half a billion-dollar market cap and $300 million in forecasted 2019 revenue. Cerence has over 60 automotive customers and its technology can be found in 280 million vehicles. Previously, Dhawan was CTO of Harman International and President of the Connected Services Division. He joined Harman through an acquisition of Symphony Teleca where he was President and CEO. He has held a number of other executive and technical positions at leading technology companies. Sanjay earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Brunel University in England. Cerence is the biggest player today for in-vehicle voice assistants but competition in the space has become fierce. It's a great conversation about the past, present, and future of voice and AI in the car.

This week's interviews were conducted onsite at the All About Voice Conference in Munich, Germany. That enabled us to capture the European (and Isreali and even some U.S.) perspective on voice assistant adoption. The five guests come from France, Germany, Isreal, and Poland. We discuss European voice assistant adoption, voice UX design principles, open source versus proprietary software approaches, voice assistant experiments in primary education, voice in podcasting and media, and enterprise voice adoption. Guests appear in this order: - 3:08 Jan König, co-founder and CEO of Jovo - 13:35 Adva Levin, founder and CEO of Pretzl Labs - 25:18 Alexis Hue, Managing Director at Voice & You, Partner at Via ID - 36:39 Karol Stryja, Chief Podcast Officer at Abstra - 44:45 Tim Kahle, co-founder and CEO of 169 Labs

During the Voice 19 conference, I had the opportunity to host a panel discussion of enterprise voice leaders from Nestle, Royal Bank of Canada, and the American Red Cross. We discuss the first multimodal Alexa skill, Nestle Goodness, with Josh Baillon who also reviewed the company's voice strategy pillars of search, commerce, and utility. And, we hit on lessons learned around voice app discovery. Royal Bank of Canada's Ryan Matthews talked about a variety of financial services use cases and the need for continuous voice experiences as users switch between a speaker, the car, and wireless earbuds. He also goes into depth on the organizational structure behind how RBC's innovation lab works across divisions. Michelle Mullenax of the American Red Cross also discusses her very lean voice innovation organization model and how that has yielded novel skills for blood donation, first aid, and disaster response. The former skill enables account linking and scheduling of blood donations as well as more information around the procedures. All three guests offered an insider's viewpoint on what it takes to bring the idea of a voice app to production from within large, global organizations.

Financial services has become one of the leading industries driving the adoption of voice ad AI technologies. At the Voice 19 conference this year I hosted a panel with Adam Kaye, VP of Architecture Global Business Technology Solutions for Prudential Financial; Mark Jamison, Global Head of Innovation Design for Visa; and, Sunayna Tuteja, head of strategic partnership and emerging technologies at TD Ameritrade. We talk about how voice AI is impacting these companies in their relationships with consumers, partners, and internal operations, and where the technology is headed.

Amazon held its annual Alexa product launch event in September 2019 and there were some expected announcements along with a few surprises. Hearables, smart glasses, smart home, Samuel L. Jackson, Alexa Auto and many more topics were covered in more than 80 announcements. Breaking it all down for you this week are Amazon VP of smart home Daniel Rausch, USA Today's Jefferson Graham, Chris Albrecht of The Spoon, and Ben Fox Rubin from CNET. Voicebot's Bret Kinsella also offers his "hot take" on the key themes of significance from the event.

Chris Mitchell is CEO and founder of Audio Analytic. He has a Ph.D. in information retrieval from Anglia Ruskin University and also holds degrees in audio and music technology and electrical and electronics engineering. He filed a patent for some of the core technology behind Audio Analytic more than a decade ago after completing his Ph.D. and then accepted a Kaufman Fellowship for entrepreneurship in 2007. He returned to Anglia as a lecturer and researcher and founded Audio Analytic in 2010. You may be familiar with speech recognition and how it helps Alexa and Siri understand what you are saying. Audio Analytic is focused on non-speech sound recognition such as sirens, crashes, alarms, and other sonic qualities that occur in our environment.

Jeff Adams is best known for leading the ASR team that built Amazon's Alexa and we went into that history in-depth in episode 59 last year. He has accumulated over 20 patents in speech technology since the 1990s working as an engineer and CTO for some of the biggest names in the industry. Today, Jeff is CEO of Cobalt Speech which helps develop voice technology for new applications beyond what you see from Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri. He shares 10 of these innovative applications in this week's episode to illustrate how broadly voice technology will soon impact our daily lives. Jeff has worked on some of these solutions, others he has observed in the market, and a few are still yet to come

Gene Munster is managing partner at Loup Ventures, a venture capital fund focused on early-stage investing. We discuss Apple's voice strategy, Voice SEO data, smart speaker sales forecasts and much more. Munster co-founded Loup after 21 years as a research analyst at Piper Jaffrey where he covered familiar names such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. During his career, he has been named Top Stock Picker from Forbes, Best on the Street from The Wall Street Journal, and was widely followed for his Apple coverage. Gene holds a bachelor's degree in finance and entrepreneurship from the University of St. Thomas. At Loup, Gene writes nearly daily on a variety of topics and often these stories relate to voice.

Braden Ream is co-founder and CEO of Voiceflow which was officially founded in 2018. The company initially started around the idea of creating a new company to support the rise of voice assistants and that led the team to create several interactive children's stories using Storyline. They then decided to build their own software to better meet their needs and this software so intrigued investors that Voiceflow pivoted to a code-free voice app development, design, and prototyping platform in late 2018. Braden is a graduate of the Ivey Business School at Western University in Canada. Voiceflow is headquartered in Toronto and there are 15,000 registered users of the platform which hosts over 5,000 voice apps.

This week's interviews are all about the intersection of podcasts (the content) and voice assistants (the channel). Interviews were conducted onsite at the Podcast Movement conference. Guests include Zack Reneau-Wedeen of Google followed by Tom Webster from Edison Research, Suzy Schulz of Westwood One, Will Mayo of Spoken Layer and Steve Goldstein from Amplifi Media. We close with Ahmed Bouzid and Brielle Nickoloff from Witlingo. In all, seven guests weigh in on the intersection of podcasts and voice.

David Isbitski joined the Alexa team in early 2015, shortly after the Amazon Echo launched and before Alexa Skills Kit or the skill store. When he started, it was all about developer office hours, slack groups, and meetups. Today, it is more often about conference keynotes and boardrooms. Bret Kinsella interviewed Dave at the Voice 19 Conference to get a sense about how things have changed over the past five years and what that means going forward for voice assistant adoption. Isbitski is currently chief evangelist for Alexa and before 2015 he held a similar role for the Amazon App Store. Prior to that, he spent 6 years as a technical evangelist at Microsoft and earlier in his career he was a technology manager at J&J and a Principal at BT.

Adam Cheyer is co-founder and VP of Engineering of Viv Labs and Vice President of R&D at Samsung. He is also a founding member of Change.org and Sentient. Previously, he was co-founder and VP of Engineering at Siri and a director of engineering at Apple. Earlier in his career, Adam held executive roles at SRI International in the computer-human interaction center and the artificial intelligence center. He earned an undergraduate computer science degree from Brandeis and an MS in computer science from UCLA. He is a pioneer in the world of voice assistants building his first over 25 years ago. Here is my interview with Adam onsite at Voice 19.

Voicebot recently surveyed over 300 marketers to determine their enthusiasm and activity around voice assistants as a marketing channel. That report includes 20 charts and 30 pages of analysis and can be downloaded at no cost at voicebot.ai/research. In this episode, host Bret Kinsella is joined by David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices.com, and Ava Mutchler of Voicebot.ai for an in-depth discussion of the key findings. The discussion was originally recorded as a webinar and used a format that allows podcast listeners to follow along. How many marketers have launched voice apps? Which voice assistants do they favor today and which will be the best long-term bets? What types of voice apps are most common? These and several other topics are reviewed. It's time to go data diving and figure out marketer sentiment and activity in the voice app ecosystem.

Voice Summit 19 was the largest gathering of voice industry professionals globally in 2019. Voicebot took the opportunity to speak with six industry leaders to get their perspective on the conference, where voice adoption has been and where it is headed. Host Bret Kinsella is joined by Amir Hirsh, CEO of Audioburst, Bruce Rase, CEO of AgVoice, Steven Tingiris, CEO of Dabble Labs, Pat Higbie, CEO of XAPPmedia, Guilio Caperdoni, head of innovation at Videmme Consulting, and Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, the global head of voice at Nodes Agency.

This week's episode is the audio from a recent webinar focused on the results of the Voice Assistant SEO Report for Brands. Ben Fisher of Magic + Co. and Ava Mutchler from Voicebot.ai join as guests to discuss the results. The report included results from over 4,000 questions about 200 consumer brands asked of Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, and Siri. The results surprised many because they were much worse than voice assistants typically do on general knowledge questions and ran counter to what SEO consultants are recommending. We discuss the implications for brands and what they should do to raise their profile on voice assistants.

There have been so many rich insights offered by Voicebot Podcast guests that I wanted to figure out a simple way to unlock a few of those nuggets in case you missed the episodes. I also wanted to hear some discussion among dedicated and erudite listeners about what was said by past guests and what they thought mattered most. With 100 episodes to choose from, we narrowed it down by asking listeners to let me know their favorite episodes and why. Our panelists also weighed in and by my count, we discussed at least 23 episodes. Amy Stapleton of Tellables, Pete Haas from Conversation Curve, and Dave Kemp from Oaktree join me on the 100 episode retrospective. What a long, fruitful trip it's been. Hear comments about episodes that included Adam Cheyer, Ron Croen, Cathy Pearl, Dave Isbitski, Lisa Falkson, Karen Kaushansky, Vijay Balasubramanian, Brad Abrams, and many more.

The first half of 2019 started with data around big growth numbers for smart speakers over the previous year, Amazon saying there were more than 100 million Alexa enabled devices, followed within a week by Google announcing there were over 1 billion devices with Google Assistant. That was followed by a lot of voice assistant news across multiple devices ranging from patio umbrellas to motorcycle helmets from the U.S. and China at CES. As the year progressed many more stories followed about on-device performance, new voice assistant features, new enterprise applications, and notably, issues and news items focused on privacy and security. Joining me today are Pete Erickson of Modev, Ben Fox Rubin of CNET, and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. They share their thoughts on the news that was most noteworthy thus far in 2019.

There are five guests in this week's episode that all attended and presented at the recent AI, Bots, and Marketing meetup in New York City. We are joined by Matt Hartman, a partner at Betaworks. He is followed by Brandon Kaplan, CEO of voice-focused agency Skilled Creative. Those were both recorded on site prior to the event and are followed by some post-event interviews with Claire Mitchell of Vayner Media, Saqib Muhammad and Zohaib Ahmed from Resemble Ai. We conclude with Alec Lazarescu, the organizer for the largest AI meetup in NYC.

Rupal Patel is the founder and CEO of VocaliD. She founded the company in 2014 to provide voice prostheses for people that cannot speak in their own voices. The company continues with that work today and has expanded into customized voices for brands looking for a distinctive sound in their efforts around voice assistants. VocaliD was a Mass Challenge finalist in 2014 where it participated in the accelerator program. Patel has also been a professor at Northeastern University for the past 16 years with joint appointments in the departments of health science and computer science. She also holds an affiliate faculty position at Harvard and MIT for the Division of Health Science and Technology but focuses her attention today on VocaliD. Early in her career while studying for her doctorate, Rupal also spent time as a speech pathologist. She earned a Ph.D. in Speech Language Pathology from the University of Toronto and an undergraduate degree in Neuropsychology from the University of Calgary. Patel completed her post-doc work at MIT.

Today's episode is a compilation of six interviews captured onsite at Amazon's inaugural Re: MARS conference earlier this month. MARS stands for Machine Learning, AI, Robots, and Space, and it is designed to showcase what Amazon thinks about the future of tech. We have a great lineup to discuss the Alexa Conversations and the cross-skill goal completion announcements as well as innovations on display ranging from neural detection from wrist movements to drone delivery and how we interact with robots. I purposely asked a couple of people to join the discussion that are not part of the voice industry so we could also get a perspective about some of the other innovations that Amazon and its partners had on display. First up, we have Dylan Zwick form Pulse Labs followed by James Wilsterman of game developer Volley. Third and fourth in line are Stu Miniman from The Cube and Silicon Angle followed by Jeffrey Dastin of Reuters. We conclude with John Gillilam of Bondad.fm and Steve Arkonovich of Philosophical Creations. So, we have two long-time developers and voice industry company founders to start us off with commentary about Alexa Conversations. In the middle, we have two Amazon and tech industry watchers discussing topics beyond voice that you may find both relevant and interesting. We close with two developers that taught themselves to code so they could participate in the Alexa ecosystem, have had substantial success with Alexa skills and they weigh in on Alexa and other technologies they saw at Re: MARS.

Audrey Arbeeny is an Emmy Award Winning Executive Producer and Creative Director that is also the founder of Audiobrain, a leading sonic branding agency. Sonic branding is brand strategy and production based on sound. In Audiobrain's model, sonic branding includes strategy, original composition, sound design, audio identities, music supervision and licensing, research and usability, voice casting, education, UI design and more. Audrey founded the company 16 years ago after many years as a senior producer at Elias Arts where she started the sound branding division. Since 2008, she has been a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute and teaches the only sonic branding course in the nation. Audrey has also been the music supervisor for past 9 Olympic Broadcasts by NBC.

Margaret Mayer is the Managing Vice President, Messaging, Conversational AI & Emerging Technologies at Capital One and has been with the company over 20 years. In her current role, Mayer is well known for her work overseeing Capital One's Eno AI-based bot and Alexa skill, which was the first banking skill on the platform. Earlier in her career, Mayer was a database administrator. She earned an engineering degree from Cornel University and a PhD in industrial engineering from Lehigh University.

Marco Iacono is COO at Viv Labs and a VP of mobile R&D at Samsung. Viv Labs is the Samsung acquisition that gave us Bixby 2.0 that was introduced last summer with the Galaxy Note 9 Launch. Marco was previously the engineering project manager for Siri at Apple for iOS, CarPlay, and Apple Watch. Earlier in his career, Marco worked at PwC and he started off out of school as a Java Engineer at Dulcian. Marco earned a BS in Computer Science from Syracuse University where he is currently a member of the advisory board for the Dept of Electrical Engineering. He is the only person that has served in product leadership for the launch of two of the five leading consumer voice assistants in the market today. Marco discusses voice assistant design, launch, and where we are headed.

Amir Hirsh is founder and CEO of Audioburst. He founded the company in 2014 after a long career in cybersecurity with the idea of transcribing and indexing all audio content to make search and discovery as easy for audio as it is for text. Audioburst currently lists a lot of big names as customers including LG, Microsoft, Samsung, Dentsu, and Hyundai. Before Audioburst, Amir was a founder of Collactive which was acquired by IAI. He was also a founder of Sendoo and Blue Security. Earlier in his career, he was VP of R&D at Riptech which was acquired by Symantec in 2002. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from George Mason University and also studied at Ben Gurion University.

The annual Google I/O developer conference had a lot of focus on Google Assistant as expected, but the company's direction is clearly shifting. In this week's Voicebot Podcast, four Google Action developers offer their initial reactions to the Google I/O keynotes and what they indicate about what Google sees as important and where the product line is headed over the next year. Dominik Meissner of 169 Labs talks about Duplex on the web, the on-device Google Assistant, the rise of Google's focus on privacy, and the new Nest Home branding. The second interview is with Chad Gilhoi, one of the top independent Google Action developers. Chad zeroed in on the focus around Assistant integration with Android apps, the new Nest Home Hub Max, the need for better Chromecast integration, and the new Canvas multimodal development environment. He also commented on Google's lack of focus around monetization and developer success stories with revenue generation. Jochen Emig of ONSEI also pointed out the focus around Android app integration with Google Assistant, the potential conflict between apps and Actions when using voice, the use of facial identification as a feature of the Nest Hub Max smart display, and the privacy emphasis. He also discussed a recent Google Action implementation ONSEI completed for a German retailer that includes product search and the ability to purchase over 35,000 SKUs by voice. Finally, Nick Schwab was intrigued by Google's entry into accessibility features that leverage voice technologies and applies them at a "human level." He also discussed Duplex for the Web, voice integration for search, and Android Automotive. He hopes over the next year to see the integration of Google's many development tools to create a more unified developer experience.

Dave Isbitski became Amazon's first chief evangelist for Alexa in 2014. That's five years, but in smart speaker time, it's an eternity. Dave started out hosting office hours in Alexa Slack, going to Meetups and more recently is most commonly seen speaking at conferences around the world. We caught up at the Alexa Live online conference recording session in Seattle shortly after he finished up recording the keynote. Prior to his role on the Alexa team, Isbitski was the chief evangelist for the Amazon App Store. That was preceded by six years as a technical evangelist at Microsoft and time as a technical manager for Johnson & Johnson. We talk about building a developer community in the early days after the Alexa launch, how voice is changing consumer expectations and what brands should be thinking about in building their voice strategy.

Ron Croen was the founding CEO of Nuance who worked with three researchers at SRI to launch the company in 1994. Nuance went public in 2000 and merged with Scansoft a few years later. Today Nuance's market cap is just under $5 billion and for about a decade the company was THE voice company worldwide. Ron had a front row seat to many formative developments and events in the early days of voice technology. Amazon Echo truly impressed him when it came out in 2014 because it broke many tenets of industry conventional wisdom. He is now a partner at You and Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures where he is looking at investing in voice once again but even is more enthusiastic about virtual humans. Welcome to the longest Voicebot Podcast to date. If you want to learn a lot about the early days of voice technology and what it tells us about where we are today, Ron is a great tour guide.

Voice interaction is becoming a common feature in cars but it is about more than just controlling temperature settings and navigation. Three innovators join Voicebot Podcast this week to share how they expect voice interaction in the car to evolve. John Foster, CEO of Aiqudo, discusses how tasks can be executed by using voice to activate one or more mobile apps while driving. Aiqudo's view is that all of the things you want to do are already reflected on the smartphone and the key is to make all of that accessible hands free while driving. Rachel Battish, vice president of product at Audioburst, outlined how her company is indexing audio content and making it accessible in short "bursts" that can be delivered in a series or in response to a query. Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media discusses how radio and other audio content can maintain their historical role entertaining drivers as we transition from preset buttons to voice requests. The interviews were conducted onsite at Voice of the Car Summit.

Voice assistants in the car pre-date Siri on iPhone by a decade and smart speakers in the home by even longer. The use cases bring obvious benefits because voice allows drivers to execute key activities in the car while keeping their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. Recorded live at the first Voice of the Car Summit, Arianne Walker discusses Amazon's Alexa Auto strategy, Adam Emfield reveals what Nuance has learned by bringing voice into the cabins of every major automaker, and Rashmi Rao of Harman describes how the infotainment system is the central hub for voice in the car and is arbitrating user queries before sending them to multiple assistants.

Matt Ware and Lachlan Pottenger of FIRST Digital in Australia join Ava Mutchler and Bret Kinsella to discuss the results of the 2019 Australia Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report. The adoption rate is fast, Google Home dominates, and smart speaker users employ the devices with more frequency than their American peers. The Australia experience is instructive for how smart speakers and voice assistants are seeing adoption in countries that have come online after the U.S. We talk use cases, differences with the U.S., and what consumers really care about.

Steven Arkonovich is a professor of philosophy at Reed College by day and a leading Alexa skill developer by night. He began developing Alexa skills in 2015 before the ASK SDK was released and is best known for having the top-rated Alexa skill for weather. Big Sky has over 2,500 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. That puts Big Sky in the top 20 for skill reviews overall and number one in the weather category. Number 2 is Alexa's native weather skill with about one-ninth the reviews and 2-star rating. An extraordinary element of Steve's story is that he had never done any software programming before starting with Alexa and he still developed some of the more complex skills on the platform. Steve earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Berkeley and an undergraduate degree from UCLA.

Tom Livne is the CEO and co-founder of Verbit.ai. The company provides an AI-driven transcription service for the legal and academic markets that guarantees 99.9% accuracy through a combination of speech-to-text automated speech recognition and human editors. Verbit recently raised $23 million less than one year after raising a seed round of $11 million on the strength of 400% growth. Previously, Tom was co-founder and President of AppInsight. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Technion, and earned a law degree from IDC Herzliya.

This episode is all about US smart speaker adoption data and trends and what it tells us about the future of voice assistant use worldwide. Jeff McMahon (CEO Voicify), Jason Fields (Chief Strategy Officer Voicify), and Ava Mutchler (Voicebot) join host Bret Kinsella discussing data from the recent 2019 U.S. Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report. Topics include the smart speaker rate of adoption, killer app use cases, device market share, changes from 2018, and voice app discovery challenges and solutions.

Mark Lippett joined XMOS in 2006 as VP of Engineering and was later promoted to COO and then CEO about three years ago. XMOS is a fabless semiconductor company with a particular emphasis on IP and products for far-field voice recognition. The company claims to be the first Alexa Voice Service certified solution for linear mic arrays and is used in devices ranging from smart speakers Orange Djingo and Deutsche Telekom Magenta to the Freebox Delta streaming media player. Before XMOS, Mark was CTO and co-founder of silicon IP and embedded software provider Ignios. Earlier in his career, he was a network systems engineer at Texas Instruments. Mark earned an MBA from Henley Management College and a Masters in Engineering for Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Surrey.

Vijay Balasubramaniyan co-founded Pindrop Security in 2011 after completing his PhD and presenting his research about verifying identity based on sounds other than voices in telephone calls. He is the current CEO. The company uses voice biometrics to detect phone-based fraud and notably raised a $90 million funding round in December to expand into Europe and to start securing smart speakers and other voice-activated devices. Prior to founding Pindrop, Vijay was a software engineer at IBM, Google, Siemens, and Intel. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an engineering and computer science degree from R.V. College of Engineering.

Matt Ware is Group Operating Director at Agencies 3Di, First, and TPN, and Lachlan Pottenger is Creative Director at First, a leading digital agency in Australia and the country's top developer of voice apps. Matt and Lachlan talk about a Google Action for Kmart that recommends gifts by type and price and integrates with the retailer's inventory management system to tell shoppers product availability by store location. It has a user return rate of over 30% and 60% of voice sessions include a screen. This is a real-world voice shopping use case that is succeeding today. The interview was recorded on site at the Business of Bots conference in San Francisco 2019.

Amy Stapleton is CEO and founder of Tellables which works with authors to develop interactive story games designed to be played through voice assistants and social robots. Before founding Tellables, Amy was an analyst at Opus Research where she focused on intelligent assistants and coined the term meta assistant. Earlier, she worked in the technology services group at NASA for 14 years and was also a product manager at SAP. Amy earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Germanic Languages and Literature and holds degrees from UNC Chapel Hill and UNC Greensboro.

Ben Fisher is CEO and founder of Magic and Co, a voice consultancy that helps brands and enterprises implement voice assistant technologies. Previously Ben served as Chief Technology Officer of Doable Innovation and Waywire Networks. He began his career as a software engineer at Comcast and has a degree in philosophy and economics from Washington University in St. Louis. We talk voice apps, brands, discovery, and how voice assistants are changing marketing at places like Chobani, Bic, and the music industry.

Voice assistant use in the car is 60% higher than smart speakers on a monthly basis, but it doesn't get as much attention. There are more users and the use cases are different. The In-Car Voice Assistant Adoption Report sheds light on these differences. Bradley Metrock from VoiceFirst.fm and Niko Vuori of Drivetime.fm collaborated with Voicebot on the research and we discuss the findings along with my colleague Ava Mutchler. We break down the data and trends that will bring new focus to the car in 2019.