The Voicebot Podcast

Niko Vuori is founder and CEO of Drivetime.fm, a company focused on creating games that you can safely play while you drive. The company's first title is a voice interactive trivia game that mimics a morning radio show and substitutes gameplay for music. Niko was formerly co-founder and COO of Rocket Games which was acquired by Penn National Games in 2016. He was formerly head of product at Toy Talk (which eventually became Pullstring) and studio general manager at Zynga where he oversaw Zynga Poker and FrontierVille which together generated over $300 million in annual revenue. We discuss voice interactive games, why Drivetime.fm is betting it all on the car, and how you can get people to incorporate a 30-minute game into their daily routine. Niko earned an MBA from Berkeley's Haas School and an undergraduate degree from the University of York.

Brian Roemmele first started working with voice technology in the 1980's and recently expanded his research efforts. At the Alexa Conference in January 2019, Brian offered an update about his work including a forthcoming book called "The Last Interface," and product concepts named the Intelligence Amplifier and Wisdom Keeper. The Intelligence Amplifier will be a tool that records your life in real-time and instantly enables you to retrieve any information from your life experiences as needed. It will also have agency to anonymously gather information or execute tasks on your behalf. The wisdom keeper will be your manifestation while you are not there and can represent you both in life and afterward. Brian talks about some things that are being done today and others only seen previously in science fiction. It's a provocative conversation with a practical application of AI and voice.

This week's episode has 11 more interviews from the CES 2019 show floor. We have real-time reactions from executives at some of the world's leading companies along with some established players in voice technology. Hear from: Dr. Yoon C. Lee, an SVP at Samsung Electronics America; Lilian Rincon, a Google Assistant product manager; Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory; Dr. John Ostrem, co-founder of AvatarMind; Robert Policano, a Nuance Automotive product manager; Roger Zhang, an executive at Alibaba; Moshe Sheier, vice president of marketing at CEVA; Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO of Pindrop; Erez Lugashi, CEO of Abilisense, and product leaders from both Samsung and LG. Combined with Ep 78, this episode provides the most comprehensive set of interviews related to voice AI, from startup companies to global leaders at CES 2019.

CES 2019 officially kicks off today, but Voicebot already has eight interviews with a select group of voice innovators exhibiting at the conference this year. The Sunday before CES, 150 companies are selected to present their innovations to the media. Bret Kinsella and Ava Mutchler interviewed founders and executives at iFlytek, Woobo, Pillar Learning, Hi-Mirror, Moen, Flo, Mycroft, and Snips. We learn about voice translators, social robots, voice-interactive toys, voice in the bathroom, and independent voice platforms. It's a wide variety of voice software infrastructure and consumer applications. If you want to stay in touch with the story-behind-the-chaos that is CES, listen to this special edition of the Voicebot Podcast.

Paul Cutsinger is responsible for building, supporting, and training the Amazon Alexa developer community. He joined Amazon in 2013, served as Chief Evangelist for the Amazon App Store, and then joined the Alexa team in 2016. His team travels around the world supporting hundreds of conferences, hackathons, and voice meetups in addition to running weekly office hours and training on Twitch. We talk about Alexa circa 2016, how it has changed each year since, and go deeper into discussions around voice SEO, Alexa skill connections (cross-skill integration), monetization and more. Paul previously served as Vice President of Technology for games at The Walt Disney Company, spent 14 years with Microsoft, and earned a mechanical engineering degree from Colorado State University.

Zach Johnson is CEO and co-founder of Xandra, a conversation design studio. Earlier in his career, he was CEO at SPARK Bureau and Atmail. Way back in the 1990's he was with iXL in Boston and Germany during the rapid rise of the web. He is a graduate of the New School and today splits time between Australia and New York. Xandra has worked on some of the highest profile Alexa skills available today including Westworld The Maze, The Sponge Bob Challenge, and Sesame Street.

Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner are co-founders of 169 Labs, a leading voice app development agency in Germany. They discuss Amazon Alexa skill and Google Action adoption by brands and media in Europe, the challenges of language localization, how consumers view voice assistant technology, and similarities between voice today and the mobile app stores a decade ago. The duo founded 169 Labs shortly after winning an Alexa skill hackathon in 2017 and Tim was recently named an Alexa champion.

A lot happened in voice assistant land in 2018. An all-star panel breaks it down for you this week with Ahmed Bouzid, CEO of Witlingo, Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io, and Karen Kaushansky of Robot Futures. We discuss the biggest stories of 2018, break down what Amazon, Google, and Apple did right and wrong this year, whether Samsung Bixby will succeed, and predictions for 2019. We also do a real-time Twitter poll on whether Google Duplex, the rapid expansion of voice assistant language support, Echo Dot record sales, or Samsung Bixby 2.0 was the biggest story of 2018. Join us for a fast-paced and insightful review of what happened and what is to come.

Oren Jacob is CEO and founder of PullString and Greg Hedges is Vice President of Emerging Experiences at RAIN Agency. In this episode, we break down the latest adoption data of voice assistants on and beyond the smart speaker. User adoption of voice assistants is actually higher on smartphones and in cars, we explore how that impacts brands, media, and enterprises while also exploring how consumers use them today. You can download the report at https://voicebot.ai/research and follow along with the discussion or just sit back and listen to two industry experts share how organizations are reacting to the spread of voice on multiple device surfaces.

Stuart Patterson is CEO and co-founder of LifePod Solutions. The mission of the company is to transform how people care for their parents and other elders as they age in place. It is "2-way Alexa for the elderly," and leverages what Patterson calls proactive voice. Prior to LifePod, Stuart was President and COO of Sidekicks which was a mobile app serving autistic children and their families. He also served as CEO of Xtone which enabled apps to add voice interaction. Going further back, Stuart was President of Scansoft which acquired Nuance and before that was CEO of Speechworks for six years before merging it with Scansoft. Stuart has a voice industry pedigree going back more than 20 years. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MBA from Yale.

Nic Newman just completed a comprehensive study for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism about smart speaker adoption titled "The Future of Voice and the Implication for News." The work includes consumer surveys in the U.S. and Europe, interviews with media outlets globally, and in-home consumer observation. Nic is a former journalist and now a media strategist with more than 30 years experience. Over his career, he was a BBC Newshour presenter, Editor, Producer, and reporter for radio, television and online editions. He also served as BBC Head of Product Development and Technology. Over the past decade, Nic has been a Senior Research Fellow at City University of London's department of journalism and a Digital Strategist at Nic Newman Associates where his clients have included the BBC, ITV, Financial Times, and Manchester City. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics. We cover a lot of ground about the evolution of media through the web, mobile, social and voice epochs as well as how smart speakers are changing consumer habits.

Following up on our Podcast with Adam Cheyer (Ep 69), Samsung Bixby's engineering leader, I caught up with some developers and researchers that have worked with Bixby 2.0. We start off with Joe Murphy, founder of Vocalize.ai which is the leading benchmarking company for smart speaker performance. Then, Roger Kibbe, the best-in-show winner of Samsung Bixby Developer Showcase contest, breaks down how Bixby works from a developer perspective. He goes deep into how the Bixby NLU works, the dev environment, and his rationale for supporting the Samsung platform. Pete Haas was also a finalist for Bixby Developer Showcase and offers his perspective on building an eCommerce capsule and how he needed to adjust to the Bixby voodoo. Both Roger and Pete also compare Bixby to Alexa and Google Assistant development environments.

Adam Cheyer is a co-founder of Siri and Viv. He is the technical leader and visionary behind the original Siri on the iPhone 4s and Bixby 2.0 which rolled out this year on Samsung's Galaxy Note 9. I caught up with Adam at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco shortly after he presented an overview of Bixby's new IDE for developers. We go back to the first digital assistant he developed while at Stanford Research Institute in the 1990's and trace a 25-year path culminating this week in Bixby 2.0's official launch. Cheyer is currently a 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. 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 M.S. in computer science from UCLA. He is a true pioneer in the fields of artificial intelligence, voice, and virtual assistants.

Heidi Culbertson began her career in mobile technology solution sales for Sprint, USAT and Incode wireless. Her work in enterprise sales often required her to design solutions for companies adopting mobile for the first time. That led her to focus on user experience design for mobile followed by a move into consulting at AT&T and work as an independent UX consultant. Culbertson was drawn full time into voice in order to help her mother who suffered from macular degeneration. She quickly realized that many elders could benefit from voice assistants and that led to founding Marvee in early 2016. Culbertson discusses voice UX principles and how requirements must be modified when serving older users. She also discusses the Marvee Alexa skill, what her team has learned about elder users and why they are changing the skill significantly to better align with user needs.

This week we have Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer of Publicis. Publicis is one of the three largest marketing agency holding companies worldwide with nearly 80,000 employees spread across more than 20 agencies. It was great to get a CXO perspective on how voice fits into the strategies of brands worldwide and what they should be doing now. We also discuss how different types of agencies work and how voice looks in comparison to previous tech and marketing trends brought on by the web, mobile and social. Tobaccowala has previously served as President of Starcom and Chair of Digitas and Razorfish. He started his career at Leo Burnett. Tobaccowala earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and undergraduate degrees in mathematics and economics from the University of Mumbai. This week is about the intersection of voice, marketing & brands.

Voicebot recently published the Voice UX Best Practices eBook. It is a 45-page masterclass in Voice UX that includes over 100 tips and recommendations from 17 industry experts gathered through dozens of hours of interviews. In this week's interview, I play audio clip highlights from some earlier podcasts and Emerson Sklar from Applause and I discuss the expert commentary and where it fits into the eBook. Featured experts include Ahmed Bouzid (Witlingo), Lisa Falkson (Amazon), Karen Kaushansky (Robot Future), Jan König (Jovo), Shane Mac (Assist), Tim McElreath (Discovery Communications), Cathy Pearl (Google & Author, Designing Voice User Interfaces), Mark Webster (Sayspring / Adobe). You can download the full eBook at voicebot.ai/reports.

Bill Cava is the chief product officer and co-founder of Orbita, a voice technology company focused on healthcare. Orbita has worked with hospitals, senior care facilities, pharmaceuticals and companies in other industry segments to implement voice features into their patient / resident interactions and internal business processes. We discuss the triple aim objectives of healthcare providers and how the current delivery model frustrates those goals, but that voice offers some new opportunities to improve patient experience, efficiency and potentially clinical outcomes. We also go into HIPPA regulations and how those regulations constrain the use of Alexa and Google Assistant in healthcare today. Bill earned computer science degrees from UMass and WPI.

Voicebot recently traveled to Seattle to meet with some of the company founders in the 2018 cohort of the Alexa Accelerator Powered by Techstars. I also had the opportunity to speak with the Alexa Accelerator's managing director, Aviel Ginzburg (3:54) about how the organization recruits new companies and how things have changed between year 1 and year 2. The three company CEO and founders interviewed include Milkana Brace (18:39) of Jargon, James Rhodes (28:30) of Helix AI and Michele Meyer (39:53) of Presence AI. This week's episode offers a glimpse into the future of the voice industry by telling the stories of three entrepreneurs helping drive the change.

Doug Schumacher is likely known to Voicebot listeners as either the host of the VoiceMarketing Podcast or creator of the satirical Homie & Lexy Podcast. He is the founder of Arrovox, a digital creative firm with a speciality that includes voice and marketing. During his career he has worked with clients ranging from Sony Pictures and EA Games to Pepsi and Mattel. Doug started his career as a writer at DDB Needham, TBWA/Chiat/Day and BBDO. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. We discuss his early career learning the Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA) framework, how to write ad copy and his work in radio, digital and social media advertising. It's Advertising Week and what better time to talk about voice marketing.

Amazon held their now annual Alexa hardware event this past week in Seattle. Voicebot was onsite for demonstrations of 12 new Alexa products and 70 other announcements. Voicebot Podcast interviewed Jefferson Graham (USA Today), Nico Jurran (C'T Magazin in Germany), and Jeffrey Dastin (Reuters) to capture both the consumer (U.S. and Germany) and business perspectives (Reuters). If you want to hear from four people that were onsite, saw the demonstrations, and tried the devices first-hand, don't miss this episode.

Omar Tawakol is CEO and co-founder of Voicera which he says is creating a conversations inbox and system of record for meetings. The core solution is automated meeting transcription that also generates meeting notes with a highlights summary. Omar goes into detail about how the Ensemble service applies multiple speech recognition engines to address the meeting transcription challenge before applying AI to extract highlights. He earned a Masters degree in computer science from Stanford and engineering degree from MIT. This week's interview goes deep into enterprise voice applications for productivity and even covers the idea of compounding network effects associated with a combination of a data advantage and AI that continually improves.

Adam Marchick sat down to discuss his journey with Voice Labs and Alpine AI and the recent acquisition by Headspace. He breaks down the three phases of Voice Labs + Alpine (analytics, ad monetization, discovery) and why Headspace wanted to bring the company in house. We also go into Adam's experience in engineering and VC, how his internship at Facebook influences his approach to marketing, and how his previous company, Kahuna, influenced the approach he took wth Voice Labs. Adam earned both Computer Science and MBA degrees at Stanford.

Jeff Adams has spent more than two decades in the voice industry. During that time he worked for well recognized industry names that include Scansoft, Nuance and Amazon. At Nuance, he worked on the famous Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation software. At Amazon, Jeff led the original ASR and NLU teams for Alexa where he is also listed as the author on 21 patents. Just before Alexa's launch, he left Amazon to start Cobalt Speech & Language which helps companies solve the biggest technical challenges in voice technology. Jeff has undergraduate and graduated degrees in Math from Brigham Young, Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz and the University of Oregon.

Nick Schwab founded Invoked apps after building his first three Alexa skills in 2016. Within six months he had more sounds and was streaming 1 TB of data per day. Fifteen months later he has 41 sound skills plus a couple of games on both Alexa and Google Assistant that collectively generate 18 TB of streaming data each day. Invoked Apps also has the distinction of publishing the Alexa skill with the most user reviews, Ambient Sounds: Thunderstorm Sounds. That skill has over 13,700 user reviews at an average rating of 4.9 stars. In the interview, Nick discusses the product strategy behind single invocation skills and aggregation skills and how he has had to take a different approach on Google Assistant. He also discusses his experience in 2017 with Alexa skill cross promotion and advertising and the current Amazon developer rewards program. There is a lot to learn about the state of Alexa skills today and how the system works differently on Amazon and Google. You will definitely learn a lot.

Jess Williams is co-founder of Opearlo, a company that started out building Alexa skills for Unilever and other brands, but switched to building games and productivity skills for consumers in 2017. She goes into the story behind switching to become a product company focused around a single skill called LifeBot, designed to be your personal voice assistant concierge with many features, and then changing again to building multiple single-feature skills. Two years since founding Opearlo, the latest approach is working. The company's Alexa skills are getting strong consumer usage, the founders like the focus on a product business and they are even generating revenue. During our conversation Jess goes into detail on strategies for Alexa skill discovery. She discusses how the company launched the "Guess My Name," skill and the impact different approaches have on driving new consumer usage and capturing Amazon's attention. Yes, she reveals some numbers. This is a can't-miss episode from someone who started in the space in 2015 when Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) was first released and is open to sharing what she and her co-founder learned along the way. Enjoy.

Jan König is co-founder and CEO of Jovo, the maker of an open source, context-first development framework. Context here refers to the device type such as smart speaker, smartphone, television, tablet and the like. The theory is that developers need to have centralized logic that can serve users across numerous devices with different underlying operating systems and across modes such as voice, visual, audio, video and text. Jovo has started with tools to support Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice app developers and expanded into multimodal user experiences. Jan offers an update on what has happened over the past year since he appeared on Voicebot Podcast Ep 13. The interview was conducted on location at Voice Summit 2018.

John Kelvie is CEO and co-founder of Bespoken which provides voice app testing, monitoring and development software. Bespoken has over 1,000 users and apps on its testing platform including Mercedes Benz. John was a guest on Voicebot Podcast Ep 6 (well worth a listen) and the interview took place when the company was less than one year old. Now over two years since starting to develop the Bespoken voice app suite, the company has delivered a broad set of enterprise-class testing automation tools including a continuous testing solution that can be used in production. John goes into detail into why this is important and how Bespoken complements third-party voice UX testing solutions.

Shane Mac co-founded Assist five years ago with Geek Squad founder Robert Stephens. Since then, Assist has focused on enabling the talking internet for brands; first with chat bots, then with voice apps. Mac says the company's work centers around bookings, ordering and online to offline engagement use cases. The projects always involve backend systems integration. Whether it is taking beer orders at a baseball game on iMessage, selling flowers through Google Assistant or booking beauty appointments at Sephora by chatbot, Assist attempts to work on projects that touch the core of its customers' businesses. Mac first appeared on Voicebot Podcast Ep 18 in November 2017. This episode stands on its own, but we recommend you go back and listen to one of the most insightful guests to date to hear the entire back story and vision. We recorded this episode live at Voice Summit AI 2018 to review how things have changed over the past year. Enjoy!

Tom Hebner is the Global Head of Innovation at Nuance Communications. He has been at the company since 1999 by way of acquisition in 2008, so has had a front-row seat to observe the evolution of voice technology in the modern era. He spent most of his early career in voice user experience design before moving into cloud and innovation groups. Tom earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Villanova and Masters in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Princeton. We talk voice industry history, voice UX, Nuance and enterprise voice assistants.

Pulse Labs co-founders Abhishek Suthan (CEO) and Dylan Zwick (CPO) brought their crowdsourced voice app testing service into the first Alexa Accelerator class operated by TechStars in 2017. Since then, they have assembled hundreds of pre-screened voice app testers and provided UX feedback to nearly a hundred voice apps on Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Along they way, the company raised $2.5 million from venture funds at both Amazon and Google and Jeff Bezos' personal investment fund. Abhishek earned CS and CE degrees from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Emory University. Dylan earned a PhD in Math and Masters degree in data science from the University of Utah along with Masters and undergraduate degrees in statistics and math from Stanford.

Rand Hindi is co-founder and CEO of Snips.ai. He is the former CEO of Hinran, a web development agency and a co-founder of PlanetUltra, the first social network in France. Immediately prior to founding Snips, Rand was a freelance Data Scientist focused on Machine Learning and Algorithmic trading. He also is into quantified self and did an AI-driven diet experiment that used machine learning to gain 80 pounds and then lose it again. Today, Snips is building an independent voice assistant designed for privacy with no data sharing to the cloud. It is also about to become the first voice AI company to launch an ICO. Mr. Hindi earned a PhD in Bioinformatics at the University College London. Don't miss this episode.

This special episode is dedicated to voice commerce trends and data. In particular we discuss the results of the recently published Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report. Joining the panel are Brian Colcord and Ryan MacInnis from Voysis and my colleague Ava Mutchler from Voicebot.ai. Brian is VP of Design at Voysis, was previously a UX and design executive at LogMeIn and earned an MFA from the University of Hartford. Ryan is Marketing Director at Voysis and previously worked at Twitter, Acquia and the Boston Globe. Learn about how many people have shopped using voice, what they bought, what device they used and what they think about it all. Also, download the report and follow along if you can.

Adva Levin is founder of Pretzel Labs, a Tel Aviv-based company that creates voice-first games that children can play through Amazon Echo and soon Google Home. The company came to prominence earlier this year as the Grand Prize winner of Amazon's first Kids Skills Competition where developers competed for cash prizes for the best Alexa skill designed for children. Previously, Adva worked in product and content roles at a number of startups and has also done literary translation and screenwriting. Adva earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Economics from Tel Aviv University.

Joshua Montgomery founded Mycroft AI in early 2015 and since that time has done two successful Kickstarter campaigns, graduated from both Tech Stars and 500 Startups accelerators, raised $3 million in equity capital and delivered the world's first open source voice assistant. And, there is the new subsidiary that has a blockchain solution called Mykrosystem. Josh discusses the importance of independent voice assistants for both consumers and enterprises. He also offers insight on his latest fundraising efforts: an online public offering and a potential initial coin offering (ICO). He has served as a commissioned officer in the Air National Guard since 2009 and graduated from the University of Kansas with an Aerospace Engineering degree.

This week's episode focuses on voice AI events, products and news from the first half of 2018. We discuss Apple's announcements from WWDC and whether it was a big deal or a snoozer, the shift in smart speaker market share to Google, the impact of Google Duplex, what Amazon has done and should be doing and more. This week's guests are Tobias Goebel of Aspect Software, Pat Higbie of XAPPmedia, Chris Messina a developer and product guru best known for inventing the hashtag and Voicebot's Ava Mutchler and Bret Kinsella. We don't just talk about what has happened, we go deep into what it all means. Not to be missed.

Melissa and Matthew Hammersley co-founded Novel Effect in 2015 to use voice recognition combined with sound effects to enhance story time for parents and children. Since that time they have appeared on Shark Tank, completed the first edition of the Alexa Accelerator, closed a $3 million funding round, launched an iOS app, closed deals with major publishers and expanded their application set beyond stories to other use cases. Melissa is the former owner of Figure One Design and is now Chief Design Officer at Novel Effect while Matthew is a former engineer and patent attorney and is currently CEO.

Noelle LaCharite recently moved to Microsoft Cognitive Services after many years at Amazon including a role leading a machine learning team as a senior architect for Alexa. We sat down shortly after the annual Microsoft BUILD conference where the Cognitive Services group announced several new features and the Cortana team demonstrated integration with Alexa. In this week's interview, we cover the recent Microsoft news and its impact for developers building for Alexa and Google Assistant, how Noelle landed in AI and voice, what it takes to build a new language model and much more. Noelle also has experience working at Pivotal, VMWare, and IBM and earned a degree in Computer Science and Business Administration from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Today's guest is an expert in traditional SEO from the web and mobile and has done some of the most interesting research to date on voice SEO. Eric Enge founded Stone Temple in 2002 and the agency has won awards ranging from Best SEO Agency of the Year to Search Marketer of the Year. He is co-author of the popular book The Art of SEO, has served as a columnist in many leading publications, and co-authored an academic research paper published by the International Journal of Scientific Research and Management. More important to our listeners, he has conducted a 5,000 query test of the leading voice assistants available today, two years in-a-row. We dissect the results and discuss how voice SEO differs from traditional web and mobile search. Eric earned an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University and a Masters in Computer Science from UMass Amherst.

This week's episode is all about Google Assistant. Experienced Google Assistant developers Jochen Emig, CTO of Onsei, and Michael Myers, Chief Product Officer of XAPPmedia, discuss the most important features added to the platform over the past year and react to the new announcements from Google I/O. We talk Action Links, Monetization, Continued Conversation, Dialogflow, Google Duplex and much more. They even weigh in on differences from Alexa. Don't miss this episode. A lot of depth here from people on the front lines. Onsei and XAPPmedia work with some of the biggest brands, media and transportation companies in the world. Jochen and Michael share what they have learned along the way.

John Foster is CEO of Aiqudo, a company he cofounded in March 2017. Aiqudo was developed to help people do more things, more quickly. It is a virtual assistant designed for mobile devices and voice enables apps by making their actions accessible through simple voice commands. The company recently announced a partnership with Motorola where Aiqudo now serves as the brains behind the Hello Moto assistant. John is the former CEO of mobile search company Quixey, CEO of DHI and President of Zed. He was an executive at Real Networks and Nextlink Communications and started his career as a tax consultant at PwC. John studied as a undergrad at UC Berkeley and earned an MBA from Stanford.

Keyvan Mohajer is co-founder and CEO of Soundhound, known for the app that will tell you in seconds what song is playing. The company is becoming even more famous for inventing the Hound voice assistant that is designed to rival Google Assistant and Alexa, but enable app owners to maintain control of the user experience and data. Keyvan talks about founding SoundHound in 2004 while earning his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford, growing the Hound platform to over 60,000 developers and goes into detail about the company's recent $100 million in new funding.

Karen Kaushansky started as a speech technology designer at Nortel in the mid-1990's and moved on to become a voice user interface designer at Nuance. Later she worked at Tellme and in experience design at Microsoft and Jawbone. Karen co-founded a smart clothing company, Sensilk and more recently founded Robot Futures Consulting where she has worked with self-driving car company NIO and toy maker Lego. Karen earned degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and currently works from Basel, Switzerland.

Amazon has added a lot of features to Alexa Skills Kit over the past year. Voicebot asked two of the most experienced Alexa developers to weigh in on some of the biggest feature additions. Octavio Menocal has developed over 70 Alexa skills both personally and with RAIN Agency. Eric Olson is an Alexa Champion who built some of the first popular Alexa skills and has worked closely with the Alexa developer evangelist team. We discuss the intent history API, notifications, location, lists, video play directives, one shot utterances, multi-modal development, duplicate invocation names and more.

Chris Messina is co-founder of the company that makes the personalized virtual assistant Molly. He is a frequent conference speaker and commentator on chatbots and voice assistants and sees Molly as both a tool for individuals and as a vehicle to connect people through a new social assistant model. A former developer experience lead at Uber, developer advocate and UX designer at Google, Chris was also previously a board member of the OpenID and Open Web foundations. Chris is probably best known as the inventor of the hashtag for Twitter. He earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and shares his thoughts with Voicebot Community about chat, voice and the future of assistants.

Vasili Shynkarenka is co-founder and CEO of Storyline, the company dedicated to making it easy for anyone to create an Amazon Alexa skill without coding. Vasili started working with conversational interfaces in 2015 as a co-founder, chatbot UX designer and algorithm developer. He later became CEO of Botcube, a chat based applications development firm located in Belarus. Earlier in his career, he was a web developer focused on CMS for news and blogging. Storyline just emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2018 class, its user base has been growing quickly, and over 500 Alexa skills have been published using the software. One of those Storyline created skills, Kids Court, recently took the top prize in a contest to build children's games for Alexa.

Max Child and James Wilsterman are co-founders of Volley, a company that makes games for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. The Volley games Song Quiz and Yes Sire currently hold the number 1 and 2 rankings on Alexa. Volley also recently graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2018 program and has raised over $1 million in seed funding. Max was formerly an iOS developer, journalist and worked for Boston Consulting Group. James was a co-founder of Streak Trivia which held once-a-day trivia tournaments on iPhone and Facebook Messenger. Both Max and James graduated from Harvard and Max proudly lists himself as a Stanford Business School drop out. Volley traces its origins back to 2013 but it wasn't always all about voice games. In the beginning, they were developing games for mobile and innovating around games that could be played solely within mobile notifications. This week's interview covers everything from Volley's founding and the duo's past experience with games to what makes a good voice game and how to capture new users.

Stas Tushinskiy is CEO and co-founder of Instreamatic.ai. The company today delivers audio ads that consumers can interact with by voice on mobile and hopes to do the same on smart speakers when the voice assistant platforms update their advertising policies. Instreamatic was recently named a finalist for the Accelerator Pitch award at South by Southwest. Stas previously founded Unisound which developed audio advertising technology for streaming music services. He also has a background in eCommerce and gaming. He earned bachelor's and masters degrees from the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University in Moscow.

Voicebot, PullString and RAIN collaborated on the Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report 2018. Today's special episode breaks down the findings and extends the discussion to offer additional perspectives. PullString COO Michael Fitzpatrick and Greg Hedges, vice president of emerging experiences for RAIN Agency, join Voicebot's Ava Mutchler and host Bret Kinsella in this week's panel discussion. Topics include: total U.S. user base, appeal for young and elderly consumers, U.S. device market share, use cases, voice commerce, direct-to-consumer opportunities and much more.

Mark Webster is the CEO and Founder of Sayspring. Founded in 2016, Sayspring offers online software that allows anyone to quickly create interactive prototypes for voice applications on Amazon Alexa or Google Home. Mark is a designer by training and experience and earned a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. He worked early in his career for the NBA's entertainment division, has worked with several other digital media broadcast companies including Intercast Networks and spent time as a product director at Groupon. Mark offers many insights about designing for voice and discusses key differences between the leading platforms and how they impact user experience.

Ahmed Bouzid is founder and CEO of Witlingo, a company that helps brands, non-profits and other organizations ranging from The Motley Fool and Berlitz to AARP and a successful Virginia Gubernatorial candidate create voice enabled apps. Ahmed has more than 20 years experience working in speech technology. He worked on the early version of Alexa while at Amazon, was a product leader at Angel.com and even built a natural language voice assistant in the 1990's. He has a Masters Degree in computer science, a PhD from Virginia Tech, is the founder of the Ubiquitous Voice Society association and is a lecturer at Weber State University. In this week's episode, we talk about voice assistant development in the 1990's, the creation of voice interaction authoring tools for non-developers, the idea behind web pages for voice, what it was like working on the Amazon Alexa team and his first two years of work at Witlingo. We even spend some time assessing the leading voice assistant platform strengths and weaknesses and touch on the importance of the Gutenberg parenthesis. It's the longest Voicebot Podcast episode yet, but its packed with history and insight. Enjoy.