The Voicebot Podcast

Mark Beccue is principal analyst at market research firm Tractica and recently published a report revealing that the virtual digital assistant software market is nearly $1 billion today and will grow to over $7.7 billion in 2025. The forecast is a bottom-up analysis of hundreds of virtual assistant use cases and we talk about which segments will generate the most software revenue. Mark also goes into detail on Tractica's broader coverage of the AI market as well as chatbots and voice assistants. He has more than 10 years of experience as an analyst, two decades in tech industries and is a graduate of the University of Florida. We take a deep dive into market numbers, how big and fast different segments will grow and why user adoption is so much faster than everyone expected.

Cathy Pearl is best known as the author of Designing Voice User Interfaces published by O'Reilly Media. She is currently Vice President of User Experience at Sensely, worked previously at Nuance, was on the Ford Sync team and holds degrees in both Computer Science and Cognitive Science. Cathy even worked at NASA early in her career where she designed user controls that reduced cognitive load for pilots. She has a lot of hands-on voice design experience, is viewed as an authority in the field and has some insights on using avatars and multiple input methods to complement voice interfaces.

Tobias Goebel is Senior Director, Emerging Technologies for Aspect Software. He has a Masters Degree in Computational Linguistics and has studied at both the University of Bonn and University of Edinburgh. Tobias also has 15 years experience working in voice technology, first as a developer, then as a designer and more recently as a strategist and marketer. Aspect has a big focus on customer service and contact center automation. Chat and voice are now a rapidly growing part of that work, but these technologies are also taking Aspect customers into conversational marketing and direct outreach to new customers.

Tim McElreath is Director of Engineering, Mobile and Emerging Platforms at Scripps which among other things owns Food Network and HGTV. Food Network not only has one of the best voice-first Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps, but also represents one of the finest multi-modal deployments that takes advantage of the Amazon Echo Show's screen to display Food Networks' extensive video library. Tim holds a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a developer for much of his career.

Steven Hansen is the CTO of RAIN Agency. RAIN is well known for its more than 30 Alexa skills launched for high profile brands ranging from Tide, Hellmans and Campbell's Soup to Sesame Street and the big budget World War II movie Dunkirk. The company learned something new in each deployment and Steven shares some of the wisdom he and his colleagues have accumulated. He also talks about the company's Reverb app which enables hundreds of thousands of users to add Alexa to their mobile devices and browsers. Steven has a degree in Computer Engineering from Brigham Young University and has been an executive at RAIN since 2011.

Voice assistants and chatbots have ushered in a new UI and interaction model for consumers. Conversational interactions are very different from the structured interfaces we built previously for web and mobile. The analytics and type of data make this clear according to Arte Merritt, CEO of Dashbot.io. Dashbot has analyzed over 22 billion conversational messages from thousands of chatbots and voice apps so the observations are rooted in data. In addition, Merritt has a long history of analytics, first on the web and then on mobile. His mobile analytics company, Motally, was acquired by Nokia in 2010 when that company was still a mobile juggernaut. In this week's podcast interview, Arte talks about what he has learned from conversational analytics, how chatbots differ from voice and how all of this is much different than mobile.

The consumer electronics show (CES) is visited annually by 180 thousand people and many of the big names in tech have a large presence. CES 2017 was largely regarded as a triumph for Amazon Alexa and was instrumental in raising awareness about voice assistants and how they will fit into the future lives of everyday consumers. It is fair to say that CES 2018 put voice technology on display in an even bigger way with Amazon joined by Google, Samsung, Sony, LG, Toyota, Hyundai and just about every electronics and automotive supplier that attended. This week's podcast is four people who were there discussing what they saw and what it means.

Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory. He founded the company in 1994 to enable people to communicate with consumer electronics the way we do with each other. Sensory builds software and hardware products for voice recognition, biometric identification and more. Voice is the biggest part of Sensory's portfolio and Todd has over a dozen patents in speech technology. Sensory was pioneering the use of neural networks in the 1990's and works today with companies ranging from AT&T and Huawei to Garmin and Waze. With CES 2018 going on this week and voice already proving to be a big theme, it is a great time to get Todd's perspective about Sensory's evolution along with voice technology innovation over the past 20 years.

Owen Brown is co-founder and CTO of Starbutter AI which works at the intersection of virtual assistants and financial products. Starbutter is a leading developer on both Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger. The company's current conversational apps help consumers choose financial products with the best features. Starbutter's Credit Card Helper won awards in four categories of the 2017 Actions on Google Developer Challenge and was the largest prize money winner. Learn about choosing the right solution segment with a clear path to monetization, why Starbutter believes Google and Facebook will win in voice (and Amazon will not), and how important a clear value proposition is to voice app discovery.

A lot happened in 2017 related to voice assistants. Voice app growth, rapid consumer adoption, monetization, smart speakers vs voice assistants on smartphones, the YouTube kerfuffle, the Google Home Mini recording fiasco, will.i.am raising over $100 million and much more. We even conclude the episode with predictions for 2018. I am joined by three industry experts: Adam Marchick CEO of VoiceLabs, Nick Schwab Founder of Invoked Apps, Ava Mutchler Associate Editor of Voicebot.ai. Great conversation that takes a look back and a look ahead. Not to be missed.

Oren Jacob is co-founder and CEO of Pullstring. Founded in 2011, Pullstring is maker of Converse, an enterprise SaaS platform for building, deploying and maintaining conversational apps. Oren discusses how his 20-year career making movies at Pixar influences his approach to voice app and multimodal design. He goes into how the company started, how things were different before Amazon Echo, how the kids in his neighborhood were his original focus group and what he learned from working on high profile projects for Mattel, Grand Tour and Sponge Bob.

TRT World is a global news media organization headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey. Derrick Fountain oversees TRT World's product and R&D group and has led the launch of three Alexa skills and Google Assistant apps. TRT World has a news-based voice app as you might expect, but Derrick's team has also built two games that reinforce the company's mission around news and its brand. One of them recently won an award from Google. The apps all have high production quality with professional voice recordings and are multi-modal supporting both voice and text. Derrick offers insight into his start in audio publishing in 2004 and move to voice in 2007 and 2017 shift to voice assistants. He also discusses a global view on voice technology and how voice assistants are being used today in the Middle East.

Matt Hartman is a partner at Betaworks, a venture fund and innovation firm. Betaworks has made several investments in voice technology and recently hosted the 12-week Voicecamp Accelerator that helped incubate eight startups in tools and entertainment categories. Matt also has a popular voice technology newsletter called Hearing Voices. In this week's interview, Matt talks about voice technology segments, consumer use cases and investing in the space.

Shane Mac is CEO and co-founder of Assist which provides a voice and chatbot platform for brands looking to engage consumers. The platform works across multiple voice and chat services including Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Shane recounts how he first started in voice four years ago and the lessons learned working with brands ranging from Sephora and Hyatt to Fandango and 1-800-Flowers.

Peter Nann is the speech and automation lead at Salmat and has worked in speech technology since 1993. He started as a software developer and by 2001 was a senior voice user interface architect. His focus today is voice design, analysis and improving existing voice systems. In this week's interview, Peter recounts the evolution of voice user experience over more than 20 years, offers some tips on designing for voice and provides an overview of the voice assistant technology landscape in Australia. He also offers some perspective on Amazon Alexa and the reception of Google Home becoming the first smart speaker available in Australia.

David Watkins is Service Director for Connected Home Devices at research firm Strategy Analytics, and is one of the leading analysts tracking the voice assistant and smart speaker markets. David takes a data-first approach to analyzing adoption of Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, Alibaba Tmall Genie and dozens of other smart speakers under development by software companies, device manufacturers and telcos. He also brings a global perspective covering U.S., Europe and Asian adoption patterns. The conversation touches on a lot of data including forecasts for 2017 and through 2022. David also goes into why adoption patterns in Asia will differ from early results in the U.S. and market share for the leading voice assistant providers.

Hicham Tahiri is the founder and CEO of Smartly.ai. While Hicham started as an embedded systems engineer, he began his job as a voice user interface designer way back in 2006 and has spent most of his career focused on voice technology. He later founded what became Smartly in 2011 to help companies building robots and cars integrate speech recognition and interaction into their solutions. When Amazon Echo was launched along with the Alexa Skills Kit in 2015, Smartly began creating Alexa skills and built one of the first third-party voice app design solutions. Smartly.ai is headquartered in Paris and its software is used by over a thousand developers worldwide. The solution is designed to enable voice app development without the need for technical expertise and as a toolset for skilled developers to build more efficiently.

Brad Abrams is Group Product Manager for Google Assistant. He takes time in this interview to share experiences from the first year of the voice assistant platform. From the launch of Google Assistant on Google Home and smartphones, to the expansion into seven different countries with more on the way, Brad shares some surprises and little known facts about the platform. He also answers questions related to voice SEO, voice commerce, multi-modal development, expansion into new languages and much more. This is a rare look inside Google Assistant, how it works and the decisions driving one of the top two platforms in voice today.

Jan König is CEO of Jovo, a company providing a framework and tools for building robust multi-modal apps that include voice. Along with Alex Swetlow, Jan founded Jovo in 2017, recently graduated from Betaworks Voicecamp accelerator and released the company's first product. Jan discusses how he and Alex came to their idea for Jovo and the premise behind building voice-first apps that are consistent, continuous and complementary across UI surfaces -- yes multi-modal 101. We also talk about Amazon and Google's latest releases and how technology adoption differs between NYC and Berlin. Get the German perspective on voice and AI in this week's interview.

David is a partner and co-founder at NextView Ventures. The firm just raised a new $50 million fund for seed stage investments in the Everyday Economy. In this interview, David Beisel talks about super technologies, innovation waves, how voice and AI will play a role in the things we do every day and three strategies for driving discovery of a new Alexa skill. David previously published a voice computing map that highlighted multiple sectors of voice technology and shares his thoughts on whether he thinks Amazon, Google, Apple or others will ultimately capture the hearts, minds and ears of everyday consumers. This is a must listen for entrepreneurs and executives working in the AI and voice ecosystems today.

Pat Higbie is CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia which delivers voice interactive apps and managed services for media and brands looking to connect with consumers on Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana or other platforms. Pat has worked in voice technology for a decade and co-founded XAPP in 2012, well before Amazon Echo launched. The company first worked with mobile audio apps to voice enable their content discovery and ads. Pat says, this is why the company originally built its platform for scale. In 2016, XAPP began working with brands and media companies to build and manage voice apps. Today, the company has hundreds of voice apps under management. Pat talks about what he has learned bringing so many organizations to voice interaction for the first time and what it takes to build a scalable voice platform.

Peter Cahill has been working in voice technology for 15 years. He has a PhD. in Text-to-Speech, was a professor of speech technology at the University of Dublin and more recently founded speech technology platform, Voysis. Voysis raised $8 million in VC funding in February 2017 and has offices in Dublin, Boston and Edinburgh. While Peter expects Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri will have great success in many consumer applications, he founded Voysis to provide businesses with a flexible platform enabling them to own the entire end-to-end customer experience. Every new technology platform shift generates new billion dollar valuation companies. Could Voysis be among this group for voice and AI? Peter discusses the challenges of voice technology, how TTS differs from STT, what Voysis is up to in voice commerce and where the industry is headed. Enjoy.

Jo Jaquinta has been a developer for 20 years and started developing games for Amazon Alexa in 2015. Since that time, he has written two books on voice application development for Alexa and become a leading game developer on both the Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. Jo shares what he has learned about designing games for voice, developing within current constraints, options for monetization and even how the Alexa reward payout structure works today.

Bryan Moffett is COO of National Public Media, a subsidiary of audio content powerhouse NPR. NPR began working with voice interaction on mobile in 2014, was embedded as news in the early days of Alexa but really began to focus on the potential of voice assistants when they served 500k users on Christmas day in 2016. Bryan talks about NPR's strategy and what they learned from the most in-depth ethnographic study and survey about how people use Amazon Echo and Google Home today.

Jess Williams and Oscar Merry started working with Amazon Alexa in 2015 while at Accenture and then left to start their own London-based digital agency dedicated to voice, Opearlo. After working with Unilever and other big brands they passed the reigns to a colleague, founded a new company called Life Bot and joined the Y Combinator Accelerator. Jess and Oscar have learned a lot about building voice apps on Alexa and Google Assistant for brands and consumers and they share their insights with the Voicebot community in this interview.

John Kelvie is a veteran of voice interaction on mobile and an early developer for voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Seeing a lack of sophisticated developer and monitoring tools for voice, John founded Bespoken to make voice applications easier to build, maintain and improve. His efforts have already received an endorsement from both Amazon and Google. John covers his view on voice application development, the state of AI and the likely market trajectory for the industry.

Dan Whaley talks about how Alexa development is coming along in the UK and demonstrates some Alexa skills to point out strengths and weaknesses of voice UX design.

Quentin Delaoutre is a leading Amazon Alexa Developer from France. He is the creator of Jab, the first messaging Alexa skill, the AlexaSkillsStore.com and author of Amazon Alexa Ultimate User Guide. In this interview, Quentin talks about building voice applications, why he chose to focus on messaging and some of the things he's learned along the way.

Lisa Falkson is the Principal Voice UX Architect at self-driving car startup NIO and also serves as an advisor to Witlingo, a voice technology design and development startup. She previously worked at Amazon's famous Lab126 as a Senior Voice User Interface Designer where she helped launch three voice enabled products in 2014, including Amazon Echo. An electrical engineer trained originally at Stanford and later earning an MSEE from UCLA, Lisa started her career as a software developer at Sun Microsystems before working at Nuance Communications for either years. Her background is rare because of her deep experience in voice design. There is a lot to learn from her unique insights. Enjoy!

Just as independent developers helped drive smartphone usage with apps for iOS and Android, they are also key to keeping consumers engaged on smart speakers and other voice platforms. Nick Schwab is one of the earliest developers on both the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. His top three skills on Amazon have over 1,000 reviews when most applications struggle to receive five. And, he is sending out over 7TB of streaming data daily to his large user base. Learn more about how developers are viewing the voice platforms and the future of voice applications from a creator's perspective.

There is a lot of focus on the big voice platforms from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple, but what about the independent platforms that will challenge the status quo? Voicebot sat down with SoundHound's Katie McMahon to hear about a different approach to voice engagement. Whereas the big platforms set their own rules and you are along for the ride, Hound is offering creators control over their content and user relationships.