The Voicebot Podcast
The Voicebot Podcast is about the intersection of voice and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. It is a weekly look at trends, founders and newsmakers and supplements the daily research, analysis and news found at https://voicebot.ai.
S1 E381 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - A Deep Dive Into ChatGPT-4o, Gemini Upgrades and Intrigue & More
OpenAI introduced GPT-4o as a new model and the foundation for ChatGPT. The company also offered more than a dozen videos and other use case examples, which enabled us to break down many of the nuances enabled by the new model. Is this the voice assistant everyone always wanted? A day later, Google debuted its latest updates for Gemini and offered a preview of Project Astra, the upgraded future of Gemini assistant, which they say will turn it into an agent for users. Google provided just a couple of videos and examples, but it also showed off a much broader set of impacts across its applications. These include search, Workspace, photos, and smart glasses (?). In all, Google had more than 100 announcement at I/O and most related to AI. Below are 20 articles and blog posts that provide added context on the biggest news across the generative AI landscape. There were a few stories we did not get to that were also of significant impact and we will likely work them into the next episode of GAIN. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 ChatGPT 4o is the Voice Assistant We Always Wanted, with Two Exceptions 6 Things Announced at Google I/O, One That Mattered A Lot, and One Mystery OpenAI Rundown 🤖 Accolades for OpenAI's GPT-4o Are Rising OpenAI Shows Off New GPT-4o Generative AI Model and More ChatGPT Upgrades Hello GPT 4o Introducing GPT-4o and more tools to ChatGPT free users OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever Leaves Company ChatGPT 4o is the Voice Assistant We Always Wanted, with Two Exceptions Google AI Rundown 🔍 Google’s ‘Gemini Era:’ The Top Generative AI Google I/O 2024 Announcements Google Unveils Gemini ‘Gem’ Custom Generative AI Chatbots to Rival OpenAI’s GPT Store <a href= "https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-labs-video-f
S1 E380 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Shadow AI, Bedrock Studio, Mistralmentum, GitHub Copilot, Stack Overflow, Open AI & More
Key stories in this episode include shadow AI arriving via employees, Meta’s secret generative AI strategy, and a new framework for entertainment applications powered by the technology. There are also six stories about big funding rounds and several products adding generative AI-powered features. Generative AI News Top Story of the Week 🔦 Employees Are Bringing Their Own AI to Work Regardless of Company Support Navigating Generative AI 🗺 Generative AI in Entertainment Framework and Landscape Meta's Secret Weapon in the Generative AI Wars May Be its Smart Glasses + Assistant LLM Lounge 🍸 Amazon Bedrock Studio Streamlines Generative AI App Development AWS Rolls Out Enterprise Generative AI Assistant Amazon Q Snowflake Jumps into Generative AI with a New LLM OpenAI Deal with Financial Times Another Sign That Data is the Key LLM Battlefront OpenAI and The Financial Times Trade Content License for Generative AI Features OpenAI Shares Secret Rules Behind ChatGPT Behavior Grok AI Starts Summarizing News for X Stories Feature Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 GitHub Copilot Workspace Moves Beyond Code Generation Stack Overflow Completes its Generative AI Reversal with an OpenAI Partnership Stack Overflow Fully Embraces Generative AI With OpenAI Partnership <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2024/05/01/anthropic-debuts-mobile-app-and-businesses-subscription-service-
S1 E379 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - LLM Palooza with Llama, Mistral, Phi & Grok, Plus New Funding, Adobe, Apple, and More
Over two recent weeks a landslide of stories mostly revolved around large language models (LLM). Llama 3 was the biggest news, but the debut of new models by Microsoft, Mistral, and X.ai also pointed to a downstream impact. We also have a couple of nine-figure funding rounds, a nine-figure acquisition, and a new unicorn valuation is confirmed. Read the news through the links below and watch my discussion with Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai, in which we break it all down via the YouTube video above. Generative AI News Top Story of the Week 🔦 8 Charts that Explain Enterprise Generative AI Adoption in 2024 LLMs on Parade 🎉 Meta Llama 3 Launch Part 1 - 8B and 70B Models are Here, with 400B Model Coming Meta Llama 3 Launch Part 2 - New Model Security and Performance Benchmarks Meta Llama 3 Launch Part 3 - Meta AI Upgrade, Broader Distribution & Strategy Meta Unveils Llama 3 Generative AI Model, Claims It As ‘Most Capable’ Open LLM Around X.ai Announces Grok-1.5V Multimodal Foundation Model and a New Benchmark Mistral's 8x22B LLM Mixes Performance with Efficiency Microsoft's Phi AI Models Show it is Not Just an OpenAI Reseller New Apple Acquisition Reinforces On-Device Generative AI Focus AWS Widens Amazon Bedrock Platform With Custom Model Imports, Evaluation, Choices, and Content Filtering OpenAI Enhances Assistants API with Advanced File Management and Cost Control Features Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Microsoft Shows Off Generative AI
S1 E378 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Google Talks Agents, Mistral Surprises, Elon Musk Raising Billions and Much More
For you today, we have updates around Google Cloud Next, the LLM announcement gauntlet continues, new funding rounds, and text-to-music apps. This week’s news concludes with a discussion around the shortcomings of autoregressive large language models (LLM) and why the technology is unlikely to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). Read the news through the links below and watch my discussion with Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai, in which we break it all down via the YouTube video above. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 5 Key Generative AI Announcements from Google Cloud Next Generative AI Stars at Google Cloud Next: Here’s The Most Notable News This Year Google Showcases New Generative AI Coding Assistants to Take on GitHub Copilot Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Mistral Has a New 176B Parameter LLM and a Number of New Customers Mistral AI Floats New Mixtral 8x22B Generative AI Model as Free 281GB Download OpenAI Enhances GPT-4 Turbo Model for API and ChatGPT, Including Visual Input Cohere Releases Enterprise LLM Command R+ Signs Up With Microsoft Azure to Host Tonic.ai Places CustomGPT.ai RAG Above OpenAI Poe Rolls Out ‘Price Per Message’ Generative AI Chatbot Monetization Stability AI Releases Augmented Text-to-Music Engine Stable Audio 2 With Upload and Style Transfer Features Humane
S1 E377 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Debunking Myths, Plus Anthropic, X.ai, Databricks, OpenAI, and Much More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 377
We begin this week with three thematic discussions. Generative AI myths reviews the recent Stargate rumors and why journalists are so easily co-opted into publishing stories that may have a seed of truth shrouded in impractical, nonsensical claims. We also discuss three news items highlighting how generative AI is transforming the search market and the coalition of companies that want to displace NVIDIA from its generative AI throne. That is followed by an onslaught of news from the past two weeks. We have an LLM rundown that includes announcements from Anthropic, X.ai, Databricks, and AI21 Labs, as well as a dedicated section on OpenAI announcements. Funding highlights include HeyGen and Hailo. There is also news from Adobe, Opera, Samsung, Open Interpreter, and Financial Times. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 Sam Altman is Not Raising $7T, Microsoft is Unlikely to Build a $100B Supercomputer, and the Spectre of Dark GPUs Search In Transition - Ads for Perplexity, No Login for ChatGPT, Google Subscriptions Perplexity Will Embed Ads in Generative AI Search Engine: Report ChatGPT No Longer Requires Log-In as OpenAI Tries to Broaden Generative AI Chatbot User Base NVIDIA's High Margins Eyed by a Coalition of Competitors and Customers Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Open Interpreter, Do Engines, and Using LLMs to Enable Actions Grok-1.5 Closes Gap with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, Aces Long Context Window Retrieval X.AI Showcases Grok-1.5 Generative AI Model Ahead of X Chatbot Upgrade AI21 Labs Debuts an Open-Source Model With High Token Throughput AI21 Debuts Hybrid Structure Generative AI Model Jamba <a href= "https://synthedia.substack.com/p/databricks-claims-a-performance-lead" rel=
S1 E376 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Pi-crosoft, Unusual Inflection, Google + Apple, GPT-5, Anthropic, Grok-1, and Much More
We begin with an in-depth discussion of Microsoft’s not-quite acquisition of Inflection AI and the billion-dollar startup’s recent large language model (LLM), which appears to approach GPT-4-level performance. We carry on with the LLM roundup with a review of Grok-1’s open-source debut, Apple’s discussions with Google about using Gemini for the iPhone, GPT-4.5 and GPT-5 rumors, Perplexity’s rumored unicorn status, Together AI’s funding round and more. Of course, we also hit on NVIDIA’s Blackwell announcement and the rise of GR00T. Figure 01 may have raised over $600 million for its humanoid robot startup, but NVIDIA’s announcement was more impactful. Now that NVIDIA and Tesla both have active humanoid robot programs, you have two companies that know how to scale manufacturing in the segment. While I don’t expect this industry to hit acceleration anytime soon, NVIDIA and Tesla will help push the innovation envelope faster and bring plans for mass production. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 How OpenAI's Former Board Inadvertently Created a New Competitor Inside its Patron Inflection Reveals a New Model Rivaling GPT-4, Pi Daily Users, and Different Assistant Strategy X.ai's Grok-1 Model is Officially Open-Source and Larger Than Expected Anthropic Says it Just Dethroned GPT-4 from Atop the Frontier Generative AI Model Rankings GPT-4.5 Turbo Details Leak Through Search Engines Ahead of Rumored OpenAI Announcement OpenAI Gears Up for Mid-Year Launch of GPT-5: Report How Apple's Discussions with Google and OpenAI Could Impact Generative AI Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Nvidia Unveils Powerful Generative AI Blackwell Chip and Platform Character AI’s Generative AI Chatbots Learn to Speak Aloud Midj
S1 E375 · Mon, June 17, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Gigantic Context Window, Gemma Open-Source, NVIDIA, Mistral, Klarna & More
Google dominated the generative AI news earlier in 2024. The unexpected introduction of Gemini 1.5 is covered in depth, and guest host Allen Firstenberg discusses his first-hand experience testing the model. We also cover the Gemma open-source models and Google’s latest PR misstep related to its image generation. Also on tap are discussions around Mistral, NVIDIA, Adobe, Pindrop, and a few more. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 Google Goes Big on Context with Gemini 1.5 and Dips Into Open-Source with Gemma Google Unveils Gemini 1.5 Pro LLM With Staggering 1M-Token Context Window Google Unveils Open-Sources Gemma Generative AI Models as Lightweight Gemini Alternative Trust is the Hidden Force Shaping the Generative AI Market and Google Keeps Squandering It Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Mistral Introduces Two New High-Performance LLMs, and Neither Are Open-Source Pindrop Launches Real-Time Audio Deepfake Detection Tool Pindrop Pulse Adobe Brings Generative AI Assistant to Help Extract Information from 3 Trillion PDFs Microsoft Introduces a New Red Teaming Toolkit for Generative AI Security and Safety Testing Stability AI Upgrades Synthetic Media Engine to Stable Diffusion 3 Generative AI Funding Fountain and Money Gusher 💰⛲️ NVIDIA is Officially the Giant of Generative AI Abridge Raises $150M for Automating Medical Documentation and P
S1 E374 · Tue, May 07, 2024
Deepfake Detection with Pindrop CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan - Voicebot Podcast Ep 374
Vijay Balasubramaniyan is the CEO and co-founder of Pindrop. He first joined me on the podcast way back in 2019 for episode 86. I still recommend people listen to that episode. You will learn a lot about voice authentication. In 2021, Vijay returned for episode 193. We now have him three years later and the topic is new. Deepfakes and voice clones are common topics of discussion now, but Pindrop has been working on this for more than seven years. As a leading voice authentication solution, the team was intent to understand how voice clones could be used to impersonate a trusted user. Fast forward to 2023 and 2024 and they have a commercial product called Pindrop Pulse for deepfake detection. It is state of the art deepfake detection that is already being used by several large financial institutions. Results from customers deployed in 2023 show a 99% identification rate for voice clones created by the leading synthetic voice providers, 90% for zero-day voice clones from unknown providers, and both metrics come with a sub-1% false positive rate. These stats are essential as you will see lots of claims, but most are identifying a small subset of voice clone types or carry an impractically high false positive rate.
S1 E373 · Tue, May 07, 2024
Joanna Czajka of Opera on Adding Generative AI to Web Browsing
Joanna Czajka joined me to discuss how her team integrated OpenAI technology into the Opera browser to provide more value to users. She goes into the journey that started with rethinking the browsing experience and being midstream in that process when ChatGPT launched. That led to more rethinking of the experience and the introduction of several generative AI features.
S1 E372 · Thu, February 29, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - ChatGPT with Memory, Bard Becomes Gemini, Hugging Face, Frame Smartglasses & More - Voicebot Podcast 372
We have 16 generative AI news stories from the first two weeks in February. The evolution of assistants topped the news with ChatGPT, Gemini (aka Google Bard), and Hugging Chat. We break that down in depth and how memory and how generative AI personal assistants are attempting to fill in the gaps where their predecessors fell short. There is more funding news, and a number of new products from Slack, AirBnB, and Otter. We talk about smart glasses, a new product in the category that is not from Apple, and the unglorious history of the category. And, we also do a breakdown of the new USPTO guidelines on AI-assistant patent applications. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 OpenAI is Testing a Memory Feature with ChatGPT OpenAI Gives ChatGPT a Customizable Memory Bard Becomes Gemini, Ultra is Here, and Other Ways Google is Mirroring OpenAI's Strategy Google Bard (and Duet and Assistant Mobile App) No More – Gemini Now The Star of Generative AI Show Google Warns Gemini Users Automatically Saves Conversations Hugging Face Introduces Assistants (GPTs) for HuggingChat Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Frame Smart Glasses from Brilliant Labs Are a Vehicle for an Always-There AI Assistant Slack New Generative AI Features Help Navigate Endless Message Flood Otter Invites Generative AI to Your Conference Room With New ‘Meeting GenAI’ Chatbot and Tools Airbnb CEO Hints at Generative AI Plans Around Acquisition of Adam Cheyer-Founded Startup GamePlanner.AI Bumble Adds Generative AI Scam and Catfish Detecti
S1 E371 · Thu, February 29, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Taylor Swift + Biden Deepfakes, Azure Growth, Indian LLM, Yelp, Shopify, Etsy and More - Voicebot Podcast 371
Here are fifteen generative AI news stories from the past week. Links to the articles are below, or you can watch the GAIN Rundown via YouTube above. Deepfakes and momentum by Microsoft topped the news this week, while positive moves by Google may have gone unnoticed. Plus, we have another deep dive into new retail-oriented solutions, new funding rounds, and more. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 Sex and Politics: Deepfakes Make a Big Splash to Kick Off 2024 Microsoft Azure AI Users Base Rose by 50%, Half of Fortune 500 Adopt OpenAI Service Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Google Chrome Embeds Generative AI to Write Text, Organize Tabs, and Design Browser Experience OpenAI is Rolling Out ‘GPT Mentions’ in ChatGPT to Invoke Custom GPTs Meta’s New Code Llama 70B Rivals GitHub Copilot for Generative AI Programming Models IBM’s Generative AI Will Scout Soccer Players for Sevilla FC Brave Installs Mistral’s Mixtral as Default LLM for Generative AI Browser Assistant Leo Google Bard Gets Gemini Pro in 40 Languages and Hits #2 on Popular Benchmark Leaderboard Google Adds Imagen2 and GeminiPro To Bard Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Indian Generative AI Startup Krutrim Raises $50M to Hit $1B Valuation Kore ai Raises $150M to Scale Enterprise Generative AI Platform Generative AI in Retail & Commerce 🛒 <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2024/02/01/shopify-expands-generative-ai-features-with-synthetic-image-editor-for-prod
S1 E370 · Wed, February 28, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - ChatGPT Goes to College, The Government Investigates Gen AI, Google Faces Precarious Choices, and More - 370
We have sixteen generative AI news stories again for you this week on the Generative AI News Rundown (GAIN). Watch the video discussion above or click the links below to read the news. ChatGPT went to college this week as Arizona State University announced a partnership with OpenAI, while Washington State adopts new generative AI guidelines encouraging public school systems to “embrace AI.” Those two stories reflect a very different attitude from what the rise of generative AI faced in education circles in early 2023. Beyond that, we have a spotlight on Google relating to a new study showing a decline in search results quality and a thesis from Michael Spencer at AI Supremacy about the company’s last moonshot attempt. Plus, the U.S. FTC is conducting an inquiry into generative AI competition, we have some new funding announcements, and a few product updates. Enjoy! Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 ChatGPT Goes to College -- ASU Embraces Generative AI But Won't Pay $100M The State of Washington Embraces AI for Public Schools Google Showcases New Generative AI Education Tools US antitrust inquiry targets OpenAI and Anthropic's deals with Big Tech Study Shows Decline in Google Search Quality and Reveals Path for Generative AI Adoption Google's Last and Final Moonshot is AGI Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Google Chrome Embeds Generative AI to Write Text, Organize Tabs, and Design Browser Experience Google's Lumiere Shows More Momentum in AI Text-to-Video Innovation New Nightshade Tool Makes Art into ‘Poison’ for Generative AI Image Engines <a href= "https://ww
S1 E369 · Wed, February 28, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - Meta's GPU Hoard, ByteDance Models, Deceptive LLMs, Copilot, Google, 1X, and More - Ep 369
Sixteen generative AI news stories from the past weeks were on the agenda for this week’s edition of GAIN. You can watch the video discussion above or click the links below to read the news. Meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, ByteDance, Anthropic, Amazon, Walmart, McKinsey, 1x, Will.i.am, and more all had news this week. Eric Schwartz, head writer of Voicebot.ai, joined me to discuss the stories behind the news in generative AI. Generative AI News Top Stories of the Week 🔦 Meta to Buy 350k NVIDIA GPUs to Train AI Models Like Llama 3 for AGI Generative AI Video Competition Heats Up --ByteDance + TikTok Will Be a Key Player Deceptive LLMs, Model Poisoning, and Other Little Known Generative AI Security Risks Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Microsoft Copilot Mimics ChatGPT With New Copilot Pro Service and Customized ‘Copilot GPTs’ OpenAI (Partially) Lifts Ban on Military Generative AI Projects Google Assistant Snips 17 Features as Shift to Generative AI and Bard Continues Hundreds of Google Assistant Employees Laid Off as Google Restructures Voice Assistant Around Generative AI Generative AI Partner Parade 🥁🎉 Microsoft and Vodafone Ink $1.5B Decade-Long Generative AI Deal McKinsey expands alliance with SAP to accelerate generative AI-enabled transformation Capgemini and AWS expand strategic collaboration to enable broad enterprise generative AI adoption Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ <a href= "https://synthedia.substack.com/p/intel-launches-articul8-a-new
S1 E368 · Thu, February 01, 2024
Generative AI News Rundown - CES, GPTs, ChatGPT Team, Rabbit, Perplexity, and Much More
We highlighted 19 generative AI news stories from early January in the latest episode of GAIN. Watch the video discussion above or read the news through the links below. CES is the featured segment at the top, with some hits and misses but mostly misses. We also have news from OpenAI with two ChatGPT announcements. That is followed by news from Google, Poe, and a number of funding rounds. Eric Schwartz, head writer of Voicebot.ai, joined Bret Kinsella to break down the news. Generative AI News Featured CES Stories of the Week 🔦 Rabbit Launches R1 Device for GenAI-Enabled Experiences and Adds $10M in New Funding Amazon Alexa Showcases New Generative AI Experiences From Character.AI, Volley, and Splash BMW and Amazon Fuse Generative AI and Alexa for New Automotive Voice Assistant Getty Completes its Reversal on Generative AI and Launches Generative AI by iStock Intuition Robotics Releases ElliQ 3 Robot With Upgraded Hardware Augmented by Generative AI McAfee’s New Project Mockingbird Aims to Detect Deepfake Voices Microsoft Installs Copilot Key on PC Keyboards for Generative AI Assistant Access A Day in the Life With Ballie: An AI Companion Robot for the Home Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 OpenAI Launches GPT Store for Custom ChatGPT Apps OpenAI's GPT Store to Launch this Week - Don't Get Your Hopes Up ChatGPT Team Edition is the Small Business Solution to Complement ChatGPT Enterprise OpenAI and Micr
S1 E367 · Thu, February 01, 2024
Generative AI News - OpenAI's New Board Powers, Gemini v GPT-3 & 4, Copilot Music, Instagram, and More
Google once again made our featured story section with an independent benchmark performance analysis of the Gemini Pro LLM compared with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We go into more depth about the benchmarks and how to interpret the results. Channel 1 says it’s positioned to change the news media with its virtual human avatar-delivered stories and Accenture did a lot of generative AI revenue. Eric Schwartz, head writer of Voicebot.ai, joined me to break down the news this week and offer additional context behind the headlines. Generative AI News Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 CMU Study Shows Gemini Pro Trails GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in Performance Benchmarks Accenture Had $450M in Gen AI Projects Last Quarter, New Deal with McDonald's, But... Channel 1 Will Use Generative AI to Hyper-personalize Your News. An AI-Enabled CNN? Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Generative AI Legal and Professional Services Startup Harvey Raises $80M OpenAI Startup Fund’s Converge Accelerator Starts Accepting New Applicants Anthropic is in Talks for another $750 Million in Funding and a 4.5x Rise in Valuation (we didn’t get to it in the show, but it is a big funding rumor) Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 OpenAI Grants Board Veto Power and Forms in Generative AI Safety Advisory Group Stability AI Brings Out Image-to-3D and a New Membership Model Instagram Rolls Out Generative AI Background Image Editing Tool in the U.S. Microsoft Copilot Adds Generative AI Music Engine <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/12/20
S1 E366 · Mon, January 01, 2024
Generative AI News - Gemini, Grok, Mistral, Microsoft, and More
Google ranks as our featured story section with the launch of the Gemini LLM and the new AI Studio. Mistral and Microsoft were other big newsmakers with the introduction of small LLMs this past week. And there is a lot on the new product and funding front, the EU AI Act, an OpenAI and news media tie-up, and a lot more. Generative AI News Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Google's Gemini LLM Arrives Next Week and It May Just Outperform GPT-4 (sort of) Google Gemini Looks Amazing in Video Demos, But Marketing Makes Another Unforced Error Google Launches AI Studio for Easy Access to Gemini Generative AI Model Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Mistral Has $415M in New Funding, a Big Valuation, and a New LLM to Challenge GPT-4 SoundHound AI Acquires Restaurant Voice AI Startup SYNQ3 Speech AI Startup AssemblyAI Raises $50M Indian Generative AI Startup Sarvam AI Raises $41M Business Generative AI Startup Kognitos Raises $20M Generative AI Tutoring Startup Kyron Learning Raises $14.6M Generative AI Video Startup HeyGen Raises $5.6M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Microsoft's New Phi-2 Small LLM Shows Strong Benchmark Performance Elon Musk Releases Generative AI Chatbot Grok on X Snapchat Adds Generative AI Images to Snapchat+ Subscription Service <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/12/07/meta-expands-generative-ai-features-to-social-media-and-teases-invisible-waterm
S1 E365 · Mon, January 01, 2024
Generative AI News This Week - ChatGPT Turns 1, Anthropic's and Inflection's New Models, SoapBox Labs Acquired, Amazon Q & More
To say November closed with a flurry of generative AI news is a severe understatement. OpenAI almost melted down pulled it back together, and then we had a birthday for a little product called ChatGPT. Nearly every OpenAI competitor attempted to seize on the company’s turmoil and ramped up their visibility for sales, product announcements, or fundraising. Amazon released a slate of new announcements at the AWS re-invent conference. NVIDIA’s quarterly revenue looks like a vertical line. And that’s not all. Eric Schwartz, head writer of Voicebot.ai, and I break down the news once again this week and hopefully offer a little perspective on the story behind the story. Generative AI News Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 ChatGPT Turns 1 - The chat assistant became the catalyst for a year of change. ChatGPT Turns 1 - Timeline of a Remarkable First Year and its Impact on Industry and Society Other OpenAI News - The company was in the news for a few other reasons, too! Timeline of the 106-Hour OpenAI Saga, Altman Will Return, New Board Formed OpenAI Agrees in Principle to Sam Altman's Return as CEO, But this is Far From Over What is OpenAI's Q*? How Aligned Incentives are Fueling a Questionable Narrative. Doesn't OpenAI Board Member Adam D'Angelo Have a Conflict of Interest in Ongoing Dispute? Generative AI winners and losers of the week Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ NVIDIA Blows Out Revenue Figures as Generative AI Drives Growth Generative AI Startup AI21 Labs Adds $53M to Earlier $155M Funding Round Voice AI for Kids Startup SoapBox Labs Acquired by Edtech Firm Curriculum Associates Generative AI Video Startup Pika Raises $35M <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/11/27/stable-dif
S1 E364 · Mon, January 01, 2024
OpenAI Fallout Developer Panel
Today, we have a special episode that was recorded in the midst of the OpenAI management saga where CEO Sam Altman was fired and then hired back. While the management issues have been updated, I thought you might like a window into how developers were thinking about this incident and how the harm in reputation and relationships won't soon be resolved. Included in the panel are OpenAI developer ambassador Bram Adams, long-time OpenAI advocate and developer Bakz T. Future, GPT innovator Leslie Pound, and my Voicebot colleague Eric Schwartz. We break down what was happening but really focus on the impact on developers. I think you will find the discussion insightful.
S1 E363 · Mon, January 01, 2024
Generative AI News - OpenAI Hegemony, Copilots Everywhere, Unity, Picsart, Symphony AI and More
This week continues the theme of market shift. Satya Nadella correctly aligned with the generative AI zeitgeist in focusing on practical applications of the technology. Individuals and companies have moved past bewilderment and wonder and now want to begin implementing and adopting solutions that offer tangible value. Eric Schwartz, head writer of Voicebot.ai, joined me this week to break down the news onslaught from Microsoft, more maneuvring from OpenAI, and a few other announcements. Generative AI News Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Copilots Everywhere - Microsoft’s Ignite conference showcased a number of working productivity solutions for generative AI along with foundation models and other services. Microsoft Copilots Everywhere, A Bing Chat Facelift, and the Shift to Practical Applications Microsoft Unveils Expanded Copilot Generative AI for Business Apps and Roles Azure OpenAI Service Breakdown: GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Use Cases, Users, and Trends How GPT-4 Was Transformed Into Generative AI Search in Bing Chat OpenAI Hegemony - abc OpenAI Has Halted ChatGPT Plus Subscriptions Due to Surging Demand - Join GPTs Demo Event Today GPT Showcase - Deep Dive, Demos, and Data OpenAI's Bid to Become a Data Titan - Distilling the 4-Pronged Generative AI Data Strategy Generative AI winners and losers of the week Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Clinical Generative AI Startup Startup Layer Health Raises $4M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 OpenGPT is LangChain's Open-Source Answer to OpenAI's GPTs You.com Launches Search APIs Giving Generative AI Chatbots Real-Time Web Access </li
S1 E362 · Mon, January 01, 2024
Developers GPTs Showcase Roundtable
GPTs enable users to create a custom ChatGPT experience for themselves and others. Developers gathered to discuss their early creations using OpenAI's latest innovation and wat they've learned.
S1 E361 · Wed, December 20, 2023
Generative AI News - Grok, OpenAI Dev Day, GitHub Copilot, Aleph Alpha & More - Voicebot Podcast 361
Your Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown is here. This week represents a market shift. OpenAI Dev Day is the biggest news, but Grok from x.ai/Twitter/X, GitHub Copilot, a big cyber attack, and other stories depict a rapidly shifting market. We saw shifts earlier this year, but many seemed reactionary or random. Today, everything seems much more intentional and grounded. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Grok is here - Elon Musk is making good on his promise to challenge OpenAI with the introduction of X.ai’s Grok. It is ChatGPT for Twitter (X) users. We did a full breakdown this week. What is Grok? Is X.ai's Chatbot for Twitter Really Better Than ChatGPT? OpenAI Dev Day Rundown - Everyone was drinking from a firehose this week as OpenAI extended features, updated the models, and created a no-code environment for custom bots built on the ChatGPT backbone. We had lots of great comments on this in the live stream. 12 Things that Matter from OpenAI Dev Day - Including 2M Developers and Personal Bots OpenAI Keynote Condensed to 5 Minutes followed by Developer Panel OpenAI Unveils Custom ‘GPTs’ Allowing Anyone to Build ChatGPT Agents OpenAI Enhances GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Knowledge and Memory, Drops Prices and Ups Legal Protection Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Aleph Alpha Lands $500M, Contends for "OpenAI of Europe" Status IBM Creates $500M Enterprise Generative AI Startup Investment Fund Eilla AI's AI-driven financial analysis platform raises $1.5M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Samsung Unveils Gauss Generative A
S1 E360 · Fri, November 10, 2023
OpenAI Dev Day Rundown with Developer Panel
OpenAI Dev Day offered the industry a lot of new announcements and useful features. GPTs offer a no-code ChatGPT customization option for users, the Assistant API provides new features for developers, and GPT-4 Turbo is more capable and less expensive to use for chat use cases than 3.5, and maybe GPT-4 itself. If you would like a 12-point rundown of the OpenAI Dev Day announcements, check out this summary from Sythedia . Joining me this week are four developers that use the OpenAI APIs and have deep experience in everything from conversational AI bots to RAG-based vector databases. They offer some practical insights into the importance of various announcements and their likely market impact. The guests include: Joao Paulo Alqueres - CEO and co-founder of Iara Digital Michael Freenor - director of applied AI at WillowTree Michal Stanislawek - CEO and co-founder of Utter.one Tejas Totade - CTO at Ruder Finn This conversation was also broadcast live through LinkedIn and YouTube. You can watch a five minute super-cut of the Dev Day keynote followed by the developer panel here . The recording was a special edition of the Generative AI News Rundown, also know as GAIN for short. Join us for a live stream discussion about the top generative AI news of the week on LinkedIn or YouTube on Thursdays at 11 am ET.
S1 E359 · Fri, November 10, 2023
Generative AI News - Deepfake Market Data, Biden AI Rules, Anthropic Gets $2B, LexisNexis, ChatGPT, RedPajama & More - Ep 359
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for November 3, 2023 is here. Just when we thought it might be a slow news week, it just pours in. Eighteen stories this week! Generative AI News Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Deepfake consumer sentiment - Key findings from a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults shed new light on consumer awareness, experience, and concerns related to deepfakes and voice clones. New Report - Deepfake and Voice Clone Consumer Sentiment and Experience White House issues regulation - President Biden issued an executive order with far-reaching implications for AI regulation. While it was promoted as rules for how the federal government will approach generative AI, its scope will touch a wide swath of the industry and impact how the companies operate. President Biden Signs Executive Order Setting AI Safety Standards Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Anthropic Secures $2 Billion in New Funding from Google Clinical Generative AI Assistant Startup Abridge Raises $30M Cleanlab Raises $25M to Wipe Out Generative AI Hallucinations Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 RedPajama's Giant 30T Token Dataset Shows that Data is the Next Frontier in LLMs OpenAI Teaches ChatGPT to Read PDFs and Pick Tools Without Being Asked Poe Starts Sharing Revenue With Generative AI Chatbot Developers in New Creator Economy <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/11/01/linkedin-premium-lau
S1 E358 · Thu, November 02, 2023
Amazon Bedrock GM Talks Generative AI Model Choice, Titan LLM, and Customer Obsession
Atul Deo, general manager for Amazon Bedrock, the generative AI service from AWS, recently shared the company’s view on the industry, use cases, technology, and how Amazon is serving its customers. Thoughout the hour-long interview, Deo talked about his experience with machine learning in customer contact center applications, transcription services, natural language processing, and generative AI. He expands on the compay’s generative AI strategy as well as the technology architectures it supports. Prior to his role overseeing the Bedrock service, Deo worked on AWS products such as Connect, Transcribe, and CodeWhisperer. He also held roles in corporate development at Amazon and Yahoo! and began his career as a software developer.
S1 E357 · Thu, November 02, 2023
Two Weeks of Generative AI News - SEO in Crisis, OpenAI Economics, Midjourney, Google, Baidu, NVIDIA & More
This week’s Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown covers two weeks of news. Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai and I jammed in 16 different news stories and a few other tidbits in this double roundup. Featured stories this week include: OpenAI Economics - OpenAI is generating a lot of revenue from ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and API usage by software providers. However, the popularity of Azure OpenAI Service is siphoning off many of those API customers as they move into production on Azure, which means lower margins for the LLM kings. SEO in Crisis? - Generative AI search is about to reap substantial change in the SEO industry, and we consider the analysis of a Texas A&M marketing professor’s warning that the current crop of SEO consultants may be facing extinction. Foundation Models and Transparency - Stanford researchers have a new 100-point generative AI model transparency checklist. We consider the good, the bad, and the ugly of this endeavor. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 The Implication of OpenAI's False Start on Arrakis Will Generative AI Search Kill Traditional Search and SEO at the Same Time? Measuring Foundation Model Transparency Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Luiza Nets $10M in Funding for Generative AI Assistant That Lives in WhatsApp and Telegram AI Efficiency Startup CentML Raises $27M Deepfake Generative AI Detection Startup Reality Defender Raises $15M Generative AI Music Startup Riffusion Raises $4M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Midjourney’s First Generative AI Art Mobile App is (Almost) All Anime, All the Time Google
S1 E36 · Tue, October 31, 2023
Generative AI News - OpenAI Chips, Adobe and Canva Bring Generative AI to Design, Spotify, Opera, Observe, ElevenLabs & More - Voicebot Podcast 356
This week’s Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown focuses more on features and economics than foundation models. Featured stories this week include: Adobe and Canva show the marketers new tool sets - Adobe introduced a new list of features, upgraded Firefly models and a new text-to-vector-image model that will make manipulating AI generative images easier. Canva also extended its generative AI features as the too companies take different paths in rolling out generative AI. Generative AI Economics - Some apps with generative AI features charge for the capabilities while most do not. We walk through the market, what is being charged and, notably, who is not and why. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Adobe Debuts New Firefly Generative AI Models and Features Canva’s New Magic Studio Pulls Enormous Generative AI Toolkit and $200M Creator Fund Out of a Hat To Charge or Not to Charge for Generative AI Features - Different Approaches Emerge ChatGPT Mobile App Tops 50M Downloads, Net Revenue at $3M Per Month - Full Breakdown Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Observe Raises $50M and its Olly GPT is a Generative AI Assistant for Infrastructure Monitoring Generative AI Customization Startup Gradient Raises $10M Generative AI Agent Training Startup Luda Raises $7M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 OpenAI is Looking to Make its Own Chips for AI Training and Inference Truepic and Hugging Face Partner to Highlight the Latest Innovations in Transparency to AI-Generate
S1 E355 · Tue, October 31, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - Meta's AI Adventures, Bard on Assistant, MrBeast, Cohere, LinkedIn and More - Voicebot Podcast 355
Here is today’s Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown that kicks off a new month and a new quarter. It looks like October is going to be just as active as September. Featured stories this week include: Deepfake scams more frequent - Recent deepfakes of MrBeast and Tom Hanks highlight the proliferation of deepfake-fueled fraud and the lack of detection tools on social media (and elsewhere, for that matter). The assistants rise again - Bard is coming to Google Assistant, while Meta AI is a new assistant that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to have much enthusiasm for. What he is enthusiastic about is the new AI characters, which are entertainment-oriented as opposed to the productivity-focused Bard, ChatGPT, Claude, and so on. We break down the different classes of assistants and what you should actually expect from the marriage of Bard and Google Assistant. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 MrBeast and Tom Hanks Followers the Latest Victims of Deepfake Scams Bard Comes to Google Assistant Meta AI is a Generative AI Assistant, but the AI Characters Shift Focus to Entertainment Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Generative AI Learning Startup Gizmo Raises $3.5M Ex-Tinder CEO’s Generative AI Relationship Mentor Startup Meeno Raises $3.9M Visa Creates $100M Generative AI Startup Investment Fund Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Cohere Rolls Out Enterprise Generative AI Chatbot API LinkedIn Unveils Generative AI Hiring and Learning Tools <a href= "https://www.facebook.com/business/news/generative-ai-features-for-ads-coming
S1 E354 · Tue, October 31, 2023
Generative AI News - Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, and Many More - Voicebot Podcast 354
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown wrapping up an active September had more big stories than any other week of the month. The tech giants were out in force once again with news from Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI. Featured stories this week include: Amazon Goes Long on Anthropic, and Bedrock Gets a Boost - Amazon’s $4 billion investment in Anthropic is more evidence that, at one level, large language models (LLM) are just weapons for use in the cloud wars. It is designed to capture more cloud computing revenue for AI workloads and boost the reputation of Amazon’s AI server chips. In addition, Amazon Bedrock, the foundation model garden, now has Meta’s Llama 2. OpenAI’s Giant Valuation Increase and ChatGPT Gets an Upgrade - The reported $80-$90 billion valuation that OpenAI is pitching has many levels of nuance. However, one element that doesn’t require nuance perception is the new 2023 revenue forecast. It beat the original estimate by 5x. ChatGPT also received a big upgrade this week and saw the return of internet browsing. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Amazon Reshuffles LLM Ecosystems with an [up to] $4B Investment in Anthropic Amazon Bedrock Generative AI Service Widens Access and LLM Options What a $90B Valuation Says About OpenAI's Traction and Revenue Growth Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 ChatGPT Reconnects to the Internet OpenAI Turns ChatGPT into a Voice Assistant That Can See and Understand Images and Speech Google Bard Can Create a Personal Knowledge Graph for Users and May Become an Assistant Meta Introduces Generative AI Chatbot Assistant and a Cast of Celebrity Chatbot Characters <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/
S1 E353 · Tue, October 31, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - Alexa LLM, DALL-E 3 in ChatGPT, Mircosoft Copilot, Google Bard, Funding, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 353
We have another episode of the Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown, which provides a live discussion of the week’s top industry news. This week, the tech giants were out in force with news from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and OpenAI. Featured stories this week include: Alexa Gets an LLM - Amazon has had a large language model (LLM) for years, but never let it out of the lab until ChatGPT changed the market seemingly overnight. Amazon has fully embraced LLMs at this point and started to infuse it through AWS, and across its Alexa-enabled products and services. Eric and I discussed what was demonstrated this week, my hands-on experience with the capabilities, the limitations, and more inside details. Hour One Can Change What You Say in a Video - Hour One just launched a really interesting new feature that enables you to change what people say in a video. Add a new script or upload an audio file, and it will match the person’s mouth and facial movements with the written text. This can be used for your own footage or stock video. Check out the demo here . Assistants on Parade - Google Bard got an upgrade this week with a connection to Google Workspace and other Google services. This may be truly useful and extend the value of Bard to a level of personalized benefit we have not yet seen in the market. Microsoft also announced Copilot will come to Windows 11 next week, and ChatGPT is expected to get access to DALL-E 3 text-to-image generation. This led to a more general discussion about digital assistants and the different models that are emerging. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 Amazon Alexa Gets Generative AI Makeover and Explores New Use Cases for Consumers Alexa Infuses Generative AI Into Amazon Smart Homes Amazon Gives Alexa a Generative AI Makeover Hour One Demo Shows Generative AI Adding New Life to Videos Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Microsoft Copilot Flies Generative AI Features Across Windows 11, E
S1 E352 · Tue, October 31, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - NVIDIA GPU Performance Gains, Roblox and Salesforce Copilots, Jobs at Risk from Generative AI and More - Voicebot Podcast 352
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for September 14, 2023 is here. We are seeing another acceleration in the news cycle. Featured stories this week include: NVIDIA and the Chip Industry Rises - New GPU performance gains for existing H100 chips, the expected improvements from the GH200, and a revenue rise for the global semiconductor industry. Jobs at Risk From Generative AI - A Forrester study calls out some professions that will be most impacted by generative AI automation and will either eliminate jobs or create the need for new skills. LLMs that Reason and Act - We discuss the Imbue funding round and why enabling LLMs that reason and agents that can act on our behalf requires total company focus to reach the objective. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 NVIDIA Drives Higher GPU Performance and Sets a New Standard in MLPerf Benchmark NVIDIA “Superchip” Blast Past AI Benchmarks Generative AI Gives Global Semiconductor Revenue a Lift After More Than a Year of Delines What Jobs Are at Most Risk From Generative AI Automation `Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ Imbue Raises $200M to Build Foundation Models that Reason Databricks Raises $500M at a $43B Valuation Generative AI Infrastructure Hardware Startup Enfabrica Raises $125M ChatGPT-Powered Conversational AI Startup Druid Raises $30M Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Salesforce’s Einstein Copilot is Positioned as a Conversational AI Assistant for CRM <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/09/12/roblox-debuts-generative-ai
S1 E351 · Thu, September 28, 2023
Soapbox Labs Founder and Ireland's AI Ambassador Patricia Scanlon
Patricia Scanlon is the founder and executive chair of Soapbox Labs, the company behind the industry's leading automated speech recognition (ASR) for children. Scanlon has a PhD in speech recognition, signal processing, and machine learning from the University College Dublin, and previously was an adjunct lecturer at Trinity College and on the research staff of Nokia Bell Labs. She founded Soapbox Labs after recognizing that all leading ASRs were trained on adult speech data and showed poor results for children, particularly young children. Since founding Soapbox Labs in 2013, the company has helped leading software providers bring ASR to education, gaming, and other applications designed for children. We discuss many of the applications and how education has changed since COVID. Scanlon is also Ireland's AI Ambassador and we discuss market education for consumers, business, and government, as well as the draft EU AI Act. She was previously a guest on the Voicebot podcast in episodes 129 and 206, from 2019 and 2012, respectively.
S1 E350 · Thu, September 28, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - Cloud Wars and LLMs, NVIDIA Revenue, Mailchimp, Hubspot, Intuit, Zoom, OpenAI, and More
We return this week with the Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for September 8, 2023. Get ready for a lot of product announcements and some special segments on NVIDIA and how cloud providers are influencing the competitive landscape: NVIDIA Blowout revenue - GPU purchases are upstream of generative AI software sales. NVIDIA just announced a record quarter that was nearly double the previous quarter and quarterly record. It also forecasted a new revenue quarter for the next quarter. We put into context how this will flow down into cloud and software revenue. Cloud Wars and LLMs - What role do the cloud hyperscalers AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud play in the LLM competitive landscape? We look at the ecosystems and how cloud distribution could make or break an LLM’s adoption. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Commentary this week is led by Voicebot.ai’s head writer, Eric Schwartz, and Bret Kinsella from Synthedia and Voicebot. 😎 Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below, in case you want to dig deeper on any of these stories. Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 NVIDIA's Monstrous Q2 Revenue Shows Generative AI Spending Ramp-up How the Cloud Hyperscalers are Shaping the Generative AI Market Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 Falcon 180B Shows That Open Models Can Rival Perfomance of leading Proprietary LLMs eBay’s New Generative AI Tool Creates Listings from Product Photos Marketing Platform HubSpot Showcases New Generative AI Strategy and Tools Intuit Assist Brings Generative AI Features and Chatbot for TurboTax and Mailchimp Zoom Expands and Renames Generative AI Assistant Following Privacy Furor Apple Enters the AI Race, Boosting Google in the Process `
S1 E349 · Fri, September 15, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - Google Gets is Gen AI Mojo Back, ChatGPT Enterprise Debuts, New Big Funding Rounds, Products & More
Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for August 31, 2023. Google may have dominated the headlines this week, but it was hardly alone. Special segments this week include: ChatGPT Enterprise - What was announced, where is it headed, and what are the implications? BTW, you may be interested in the Yammer go-to-market strategy reference as point 7 in the main article . We also put ChatGPT Enterprise in perspective alongside Google’s more ambitious play. Google Uses Cloud Next to Shift Generative AI Perception - We go through more than 15 different announcements and the implications for the market and debate the merit and importance of different moves. Generative AI winners and losers of the week . This week, Eric Schwartz, Voicebot.ai’s head writer, and I were joined by Google Developer Expert (GDE) Allen Firstenberg to break down the Google Gen AI Palooza and other top generative AI stories. Also, if you’d like to hear more from Allen, check out his Two Voice Devs podcast/YouTube show. Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Like Perplexity AI, we give you source links! Featured Stories of the Week 🔦 ChatGPT Enterprise - 7 Things to Know About OpenAI’s Latest Product Google Cloud Announced Dozens of Generative AI Solutions and Reveals an Evolving Strategy Google Launches Duet AI Assistant for Workspace and Chat Google Cloud Unveils New Generative AI Tools for Building Search and Conversation Apps Generative AI Funding Fountain 💰⛲️ The Story Behind CoreWeave’s Rumored Rise to a $5-$8B Valuation Generative AI Infrastructure Startup Modular Raises $100M Hugging Face Lands $235M in Funding and a Giant New Valuation <a href= "https://synthedia.substack.com/p/a121-labs-announces-a-155m-funding" rel
S1 E348 · Fri, September 01, 2023
Hour One CEO Oren Aharon is Leveraging Generative AI to Fuse Video with Virtual Human Features
Oren Aharon is CEO and founder of Hour One, a leader in virtual human innovation, and a pioneer in generative AI. He joined Bret Kinsella to talk about how the technology behind virtual humans has evolved and the role generative AI is playing in the next set of features. Hour One's new Reals Activate technology can transform any video into a scripted virtual human experience. It will align mouth movements and sounds to match a script to the video of a person. This means any video of you or anyone else can be transformed into a virtual human experience. Aharon debuted this technology for the first time publicly for the Voicebot Podcast audience. If you would like to view the demos, a video of the full interview is available on Voicebot's YouTube channel: https://youtube.com/voicebotai . Aharon also talks about the market for virtual humans and how the rising interest in generative AI has accelerated use case adoption. He earned a Phd in electrical engineering from Technion and formerly was a co-founder at Kadoor Electronics and Vectorious Medical Technologies.
S1 E347 · Thu, August 31, 2023
Generative AI News This Week - Is ChatGPT Dying? Generative AI Market Data, Meta Challenges OpenAI, ElevenLabs & More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown is back for August 24, 2023. Special segments this week include: What does the market data say about generative AI adoption? We look at 10 charts that explain a lot about what is happening, why it is happening, and where we are headed. Meta challenges OpenAI with an open-source automated speech recognition and translation system. Game on! Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Eric Schwartz, Voicebot.ai’s head writer, and Bret Kinsella gathered again this week to break down the top generative AI stories and a few other useful pieces of information. Generative AI News Links to the stories we covered this week are included below. Like Perplexity AI, we give you source links! Top Stories of the Week - Market Data 📊 Generative AI annual revenue will reach $1.3T in 2032 Generative AI adoption rate accelerates past smartphones and tablets See where generative AI will make the biggest financial impact on enterprises Two charts reveal why so many enterprises are rushing to adopt generative AI Generative AI shifts CEO focus to productivity over customer experience Developers are quickly adopting generative AI tools, especially GitHub Copilot NVIDIA announces financial results for the second quarter of 2024 Top Story of the Week - Market Dynamics 🗺 Meta launches new open-source speech recognition and translation model Generative AI Product Garden 🪴 OpenAI brings fine-tuning to GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/08/23/elevenlabs-
S1 E346 · Thu, August 31, 2023
Telefonica and VUI Agency Talk about Generative and Conversational AI in the Contact Center
Sarah Rojewski, Telefonica's manager of AI and automation in Germany, and Patrick Esslinger, co-founder of VUI Agency joined Bret Kinsella to talk about the evolution of conversational AI in the contact center and the introduction of generative AI. Rojewski even goes into detail about the latest generative AI project and how the company is looking at the technology. That is supplemented by a conversation about user experience and how AI technologies require new thinking and are accompanied by different customer expectations. Prior to her role leading AI inititiaves, Sarah Rojewski spent three years working on Telefonica's Aura voice assistant. Patrick Esslinger co-founded VUI Agency in 2017 and specializes in voice user interface design for enterprise applications.
S1 E345 · Thu, August 31, 2023
Generative AI News - GPT-4 LLM Moderation, CEO and Gen AI, Llama 2, Voiceflow, Anthropic, Pindrop & More
It’s time for the Generative AI News (GAIN) Rundown for August 17, 2023. Special segments this week include: Using GPT-4 to moderate LLM inputs The groups pressuring CEOs to adopt generative AI Generative AI winners and losers of the week . Voicebot.ai’s head writer, Eric Schwartz, joined Bret Kinsella this week to break down all of the top industry stories. Generative AI News Links related to the stories are included below if you want to go deeper into any topics. Top Stories of the Week OpenAI wants you to use GPT-4 to moderate your GPT-4 based applications Two charts reveal why so many enterprises are rushing to adopt generative AI Generative AI Funding Fountain The $100M Anthropic deal with SK Telecom provides insight into where LLMs are headed Voiceflow added $15M in new funding on the back of rapid user growth and generative AI DynamoFL raises $15.1M to scale privacy-focused generative AI for enterprises OpenAI acquires digital studio Global Illumination Generative AI Product Garden IBM Embeds Meta’s Llama 2 LLM in New Watsonx generative AI platform Amazon deploys generative AI for summarizing product reviews Google rolls out new generative AI search features U.S. DoD forms generative AI task force Roblox is deploying its own generative AI models a
S1 E344 · Fri, August 18, 2023
Generative AI News - GPTBot Debut, Amazon's Gen AI Strategy, W&B Becomes a Unicorn, Tome, NVIDIA, Cohere, Zoom & More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for August 11, 2023 is here. Special segments this week include: GPTBot and OpenAI’s plans to politely crawl the web, along with how most websites will react or should react Amazon’s generative AI strategy and how that will carve out unique positioning compared to OpenAI, Google, and others The significance of Alexa’s top exec shifting to generative AI Generative AI winners and losers of the week . My Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz and I were joined this week by Vixen Labs CEO James Poulter to go deep on our first four stories. Thanks James! 🦊 Generative AI News Links related to the stories are included below if you want to go deeper into any topics. Top Stories of the Week GPTBot and OpenAI’s plans to politely crawl the web Amazon’s generative AI strategy, its three-tier model, and market positioning The significance of Alexa’s top exec shifting to generative AI Generative AI Funding Fountain Weights & Biases raises $50M on a $1.25B valuation and what this says about the generative AI tools market Tome is rumored to be raising a new round and seeking a $600M valuation, double its February 2023 round Generative AI Product Garden NVIDIA and Hugging Face partner on new generative AI training service Cohere debuts enterprise generative AI chatbot Coral Brands in Generative AI Lands Google and Universal Music Group pursue licensing deal for deepfake songs Zoom adjusts policy on
S1 E343 · Fri, August 18, 2023
Generative AI News - GPT-5 Rumors, G3PO from OpenAI, Generative Google Assistant, Inworld, Meta, and More
Eric Schwartz, the head writer at Voicebot.ai, joined Bret Kinsella to break down the top Generative AI News (GAIN) of the week. Generative AI News - Featured Stories this Week OpenAI rumors spread for GPT-5 and the open-source G3PO . Is this the response to Meta’s Llama 2? Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are both expected to add generative AI capabilities in 2023. Could this finally lead to the blending of doing and knowing assistants? Generative AI Funding Fountain Inworld raised another $50M+ to bring total funding to around $120 million and now claims to have a $500 million valuation. Generative AI Product Garden Meta releases the open-source text-to-sound generator AudioCraft. Apple removes over 100 iOS apps from the Chinese App Store in advance of the new generative AI rules taking effect. Google Deepmind debuts a new generative AI communication language for instructing robots. And it works! Stack Overflow announced tentative steps into generative AI land with OverflowAI . News mobile app Artifact introduces celebrity voice clones you can have read the news to you. Winners and Losers We concluded with our generative AI winners and losers of the week . More About GAIN GAIN is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel . Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn. Also, please participate in the live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout and may even show your comment on screen. Or, just lis
S1 E342 · Sun, August 13, 2023
Generative AI News - New ChatGPT Features, Identifying AI Text, Perplexity, Grammarly, and More
Eric Schwartz, the head writer at Voicebot.ai, was joined by GAIN producer and Synthedia researcher Andrew Herndon. Generative AI News - Featured Stories of the Week OpenAI introduces Custom Instructions to add personalization to ChatGPT. OpenAI removed its Text Classifier that was supposed to identify whether content was AI-written because it didn’t work. Of course, Turnitin and others still say they can spot AI-written text, but provides no evidence to back up the claims. Synthedia was the first to break this story BTW. The ChatGPT App for Android racked up over 1 million downloads in 24 hours, more than a week faster than the iOS app reached that milestone. Synthedia also was the first to break this story 😀. Generative AI Product Garden Perplexity AI adds image search and debuts a Llama 2 integration. Stability AI introduces Stable XL 1.0 Grammarly introduces new generative AI features for students with GrammarlyGo . Wayfair introduces generative AI for virtual interior creations Frontier Model Forum from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic seeks to monitor generative AI development. AI developers to adopt the White House’s AI Safety Principles Generative AI winners and losers of the week.
S1 E341 · Thu, July 27, 2023
Conversational AI Innovators at Project Voice 2023 with Lilypad, Dexer, ConverseNow, Speechly, CDI, and Calen
Project Voice gathered again in Chattanooga, Tennessee in April 2023. I had the opportunity to interview several innovative companies while on site. 2:16 - LilyPad AI, Genady Knizhnik - Conversational AI for English language learning 11:09 - Conversation Design Institute, Hans Van Dam - Conversation design evolution 23:11 - Speechly, Collin Borns - Speech recognition tools to combat voice chat toxicity 31:00 - ConverseNow, Ben Brown - Conversational AI for restaurants 42:51 - Calen, Irakli Beselidze - Enterprise contact center automation 53:42 - Dexer, Bruce Rasa - Voice AI for hands-free inspection and recording
S1 E340 · Sun, July 23, 2023
Generative AI News - Llama 2 Shakes up LLM Market, GPT-4 May Not Be Degrading, Apple GPT, Wix, AP, AI21, SAP, and More - Voicebot Podcast 340
Here is the Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for July 20, 2023. Special segments this week include: Meta launches Llama 2, making it open source and free for commercial use. We talk about the implications for the LLM market. Did GPT-4’s performance really degrade, as has been reported? We look at the research paper results, evaluate the methodology and consider a rebuttal. We also cover the generative AI winners and losers of the week . My Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz joined me this week, and we went in-depth on the top news. Generative AI News Links related to the stories are included below if you want to go deeper into any topics. Top Stories of the Week Meta Just Became a Big Player in the LLM World, Making Llama 2 Free and Open Source New Research Says GPT-4 is Getting Worse. But is it True? Generative AI Funding Fountain Cognaize Raises $18M to Build a Better LLM for the Finance Sector Preply Closes Out Series C at $120M and Doubles Down on AI SAP Announces Investments in Aleph Alpha, Anthropic, and Cohere Generative AI Product Garden "Apple GPT" is Built on the Secret Large Language Model Ajax Microsoft Unveils Bing Chat Enterprise AI21 Labs Combats Generative AI Hallucinations With New Contextual Answers API Wix Text-to-Website Showcases How Copilots Streamline Complex Tasks and Can Shape Expectations Jasper AI Laying Off Staff 9 Months After $125M Ra
S1 E339 · Mon, July 17, 2023
Generative AI News - ChatGPT's Usage Stats, Anthropic's Claude, Lots of Funding Rounds, Deepfakes and New Products
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown is back and was recorded on July 13, 2023. Special segments this week include: Anthropic’s ChatGPT competitor Claude 2 landed, and it has some intriguing features. The discussion also includes a quick demo. Is ChatGPT’s website traffic drop a reason for concern? We break down the numbers and also touch on a brand new FTC action against OpenAI. We also give you a new list of generative AI winners and losers of the week . My Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz joins me today to go deep on the news. If you prefer to watch the show, you can always see the latest GAIN recording here . Generative AI News Links related to the stories are included below if you want to go deeper into any topics. Top Stories of the Week Anthropic’s ChatGPT Alternative Claude 2 Has an Awesome New Feature and is Now Available to Everyone ChatGPT Web Traffic Drops. Is Generative AI’s Hype Cycle Ready to Plunge? OpenAI Makes the GPT-4, DALL-E, Whisper, and ChatGPT Model APIs Generally Available FTC Investigating ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for Possible Consumer Harm Generative AI Funding Fountain Voices.ai Raises $6M for Real-time AI Voice Filter Resemble AI Raises $8M and Launches Deepfake Voice Detector Generative AI Prompt Engineering Startup Vellum.ai Raises $5M UK Startup Prolific Raises $32M to Expand 120K-Person Network of Generative AI Model Testers KPMG Plans $2B Investment in AI and Cloud Services <a href= "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-06/ai-seen-fueling-microsoft-to-3-trillion-in-morgan-stanley-mode
S1 E338 · Fri, July 14, 2023
The Evolution of Conversation Design in the ChatGPT Era Part 2
How are ChatGPT and the rise of large language models impacting conversation designs and designers? Today, in Part 2 of our series on conversation design, we have four more experts weighing in on how the profession is changing and what designers should consider and do about it. Joining me today in a series of one-on-one interviews are: Maaike Coppens is vice president of product at OpenDialog AI, where she started as head of UX and conversation design in 2020. She was a product designer at XAPPMedia, labworks.io, and Smartly Ai. She was also a UX consultant at Applause. Maaike was my guest on episode 284 of the Voicebot Podcast in 2022. Rebecca Evanhoe is the co-author of the popular book Conversations with Things: UX Design for Chat and Voice published by Rosenfeld Media. She is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute in New York, where she teaches a graduate course in conversational UX design, was a conversation design consultant for AWS, a voice user interface designer at Mobiquity, and a writing instructor at the University of Florida. She and her co-author Diana Diebel were my guests on episode 220 in 2021. Kane Simms - is the founder of VUX World and a co-organizer of the Unparsed conference. VUX World is a strategic consultancy focused on conversational user experiences and is also the name of a popular podcast on practical conversational AI topics. Kane has a long history of work in technology transformation and as a writer before moving into conversation design. He was my guest in episode 178 in 2020. Hans Van Dam - is the CEO of the Conversation Design Institute and a co-founder and board member of the conversation design consultancy CDI Services. He is also a research fellow at RMIT University. Hans joined me on the podcast for episode 192 in 2021. Also, the Unparsed Conference on conversation design is coming up later in July 2023 in London. If you use the code VOICEBOT, you get two tickets for the price of one. That applies to the in-person and online conference tickets. Definitely try to join online if you can't make it to London. It is a great speaker lineup. You can sign-up at https://bit.ly/unparsed2023 .
S1 E337 · Thu, July 13, 2023
Generative AI News - Busting AI Myths, Giant Funding Rounds, AI in Education and Media, and More - Voicebot Podcast 337
Host notes - My apologies about the audio quality. We recorded on the road, and the mic setup didn't work as planned. The YouTube video audio is a little bit stronger if you want to watch this week. Also, the conversation and guest commentary is very good, so I wanted to put it out there anyway. In particular, I think you will like the discussion around LLMs and Theory of Mind, generative AI in education, and the potential erosion of generative AI startup valuations. The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown this week was recorded on July 6, 2023. Some special segments include: Mythical generative AI capabilities. From the theory of mind to general AI to emergent abilities, generative AI claims keep getting proven wrong. The generative AI funding fountain continues to be strong, but we discuss whether some companies are struggling to grow into their high valuations. We also give you a new list of generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links related to the top stories are included below for anyone that wants to dig deeper into a topic. Top Story of the Week Did ChatGPT Really Develop a Theory of Mind? Do Large Language Models Have Emergent Abilities? Generative AI Funding Fountain Inflection AI Raises $1.3 Billion Runway Lands $141 Million in New Funding Typeface Raises $100 Million for Branded Synthetic Media Platform Generative AI Content Startup Scriptic Raises $5.7 Million Generative AI Productivity Startup Dust Raises $5.5 Million Generative AI in the World German News Publisher CEO Confirms Generative AI will Replace Jobs <a href= "https://synthedia.substack.com/p/24-top-uk-universities-draft
S1 E336 · Wed, July 05, 2023
The Evolution of Conversation Design in the ChatGPT Era Part 1
How are ChatGPT and the rise of large language models impacting conversation designs and designers? Today, in Part 1 of our series on conversation design, we have four experts in the field weighing in on how the profession is changing and what designers should be thinking about. Joining me today in a series of one-on-one interviews are: Maaike Groenewege is an independent conversation designer and the creator of Convocat. She is currently the conversation design lead, prompt engineer, and NLU trainer at a U.S.-base stealth-stage startup. Groenewege has worked for 25 years as a designer, linguist, and technical writer. Tom Hewitson is the founder and CEO of Labworks.io , a webby-award winning conversation design studio and one of the leading voice-first game studios. Hewitson is a former journalist, content strategist at Facebook, and digital editor for Lonely Planet. He is also a lecturer at City University London and the organizer of the Unparsed Conference on conversation design. Peter Isaacs is the senior conversation design advocate at Voiceflow. He was previously a conversation designer at WooliesX, a division of Woolworths Group in Australia. Karen Kaushansky has been a conversation designer for 27 years. She is currently a Staff Conversation Designer at Google, and led the design for Google Watch. Also, the Unparsed Conference on conversation design is coming up later in July 2023 in London. If you use the code VOICEBOT, you get two tickets for the price of one. That applies to the in-person and online conference tickets. Definitely try to join online if you can't make it to London. It is a great speaker lineup. You can sign-up at https://bit.ly/unparsed2023 .
S1 E335 · Tue, July 04, 2023
Generative AI News - AI Search Metrics, Market Growth Data, Marvel, Oracle, Amazon, Inflection & More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown this week was recorded on June 29, 2023. Some special segments include: Generative AI search metrics compare wait time and word production per answer for Bing Chat, Perplexity, and Google SGE. The venture capital and acquisition funding fountain flowed again with a giant acquisition, financing rounds for CalypsoAI, Loora, and investment by Amazon and the UK’s NHS. We also give you a new list of generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links related to the top stories are included below for anyone that wants to dig deeper into a topic. Top Story of the Week This One Factor Could Kill Bing Chat Generative AI to Reach $1 Trillion in Annual Revenue 47% of Technology Leaders Say AI is Top Budget Priority Generative AI Funding Fountain Databricks Acquires MosaicML for $1.3 Billion CalypsoAI Raises $23 Million for AI Moderator and Security Solution Generative AI Education Startup Loora Raises $9.25 Million Generative AI Voice Startup Slang.ai Raises $20 Million Amazon Invests $100 Million in Generative AI Innovation Center UK Promised $27 Million to NHS for Generative AI Generative AI Product Garden Oracle Introduces Generative AI for HR Productivity Adobe will Cover Legal Bills if You Are Sued for Copyright When Using Firefly </p
S1 E334 · Fri, June 30, 2023
Voicemod CEO Jaime Bosch on Voice Changers, Audio Expression, and More
Voicemod is a pioneer in audio expression. The company is best known for its real-time voice changer technologies that are popular in the gamer communities, where users can sound like a cartoon character, a movie actor, another gender, or anything you can imagine. The product's capabilities and popularity extends to other use cases as well, including use for recorded speech, sound bed generation, and more. Jaime Bosch is CEO and co-founder of Voicemod, founded in 2014. Voicemod raised $14 million in February 2023 and is currently riding a new wave of interest brought on by the rise in generative AI. However, the company's user base growth began well before ChatGPT. Pre-pandemic, the company had 5 million users. Post-pandemic, that number was 25 million. Today Voicemod has 40 million users. Bosch walks through the evolution of the product, including the shift from DSP to AI technology and today's hybrid solution. In addition, he shares details about the two moments of product market fit and how AI is enabling a new era of audio self-expression.
S1 E333 · Tue, June 27, 2023
Generative AI News - EU AI Act, LLM Regulation, Vimeo, Mercedes, Funding Rounds and More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown is back and was recorded on June 22, 2023. Some special segments this week include: The New EU AI Act and how large language models (LLM) face a big risk of non-compliance and steep fines. A new analysis breaks it down for 10 LLMs. The venture capital money fountain flowed with big funding rounds for Mistral, Synthesia, and ElevenLabs. Eric and I also bring you generative AI winners and losers of the week . Generative AI News Links related to the top stories are included below for anyone that wants to dig deeper into a topic. Top Story of the Week 5 Big Takeaways from the EU AI Act How Ready are Leading LLMs for the Draft EU AI Act (report) Generative AI Money Fountain French Generative AI Startup Mistral Raises $113M Generative AI Speech Startup ElevenLabs Raises $19M Synthesia Raises $90 for Generative AI Avatar Generative AI Product Garden Observe AI Dubuts Contact Center LLM NLX Debuts Generative AI Conversation Builder for Contact Centers Vimeo to Introduce Generative AI Tools for Video Production Meta Reveals Generative AI Synthetic Speech Tool Voicebox Big Brands in Generative AI Land USA Today Publisher Gannett Taps Cohere for Generative AI Driven News Summaries Mercedes Adds ChatGPT to In-car Voice Assistant
S1 E332 · Thu, June 22, 2023
Rembrand CEO Omar Tawakol on Generative AI and Product Placement in Videos
Omar Tawakol is CEO and co-founder Rembrand, a company using generative AI to automate product placement in online videos. Earlier this year, he announced an $8 million seed funding round and this month added several more strategic investors. Rembrand represents a return to Tawakol's roots in advertising technology and his graduate work in AI. He saw there was an underutilized opportunity for product placement at scale that could be delivered cost-effectively for online influencers. AI is enabling the company to significantly expand the market. Tawakol was my guest for Episode 61, in 2018. At the time, he was CEO of Voicera, which later rebranded to Voicea and then was acquired by Cisco 2019. Voicea was an early leader in the automated meeting transcription space and pioneered novel architectures that led to rapid increases in performance. Earlier in his career, Tawakol was CEO of Blue Kai, the leading DMP for enterprise marketers. The company was acquired by Oracle in 2016 and he then served as SVP of Oracle Data Cloud. He was formerly a board director at PlaceIQ and is a board member for Liveramp.
S1 E331 · Sun, June 18, 2023
Generative AI News - OpenAI Cuts Prices, Google's AI Model Garden, Salesforce AI Fund, Generative Search & More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 331
We have another Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for you today. It was recorded on June 16, 2023. Some special segments this week include: OpenAI’s function calling, expanded context window, and price cuts Generative AI search, brands, latency, and features that matter Eric, special guest Michal Stanislawek, and I also go through the generative AI winners and losers of the week . That has been a fun addition to the show. Generative AI News (GAIN) Links related to the top stories in today’s show are included below in case you are looking for additional details. OpenAI Cuts Prices and Announced the Most Significant Feature Expansion This Year Google Rolls Out Access to LLMs, Text-to-Image, Generative Code, and More Google’s Virtual Try-On Fuses Fashion with Generative AI Generative AI Search Already Shows that SEO is Changing - New Report Microsoft Bing AI Chat Gets Multimodal on Windows with Voice and Image Search Salesforce Ups Generative AI Fund to $500 Million, Launches AI Cloud More About GAIN GAIN is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12:00 noon ET on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel . Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn. Also, please participate in the live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout and may even show your comment on screen. Please share this post with a friend, and don’t forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Thanks!
S1 E330 · Mon, June 12, 2023
Generative AI News 18 - Apple's VR Bet and Lack of Generative AI. OpenAI, Google, Jasper, Instacart, and More!
The latest Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown is live and was recorded on June 8, 2023. Some special segments this week include: Apple’s Vision Pro opts for gestures over voice commands, and generative AI is nowhere to be found. OpenAI and Google both reveal better generative AI reasoning skills for chatbots, and Google may be in the lead! We break down two very different approaches to make large language models (LLM) better at math, science, and complex thinking. Eric and I also have the generative AI winners and losers of the week . I am sure you will find that to be a fun addition to the show. Generative AI News This week’s top stories include a lack of news from Apple, the latest LLM research, Instacart’s shopping assistant, Quora’s response to an existential crisis, McKinsey’s claim that (only) 50% of its staff is using generative AI, and more. Links related to the top stories are included below in case you’d like to explore the news in more detail. Let me know what you think about this week’s topics and commentary. Apple is Long on VR and Short on Generative AI OpenAI Shows How ChatGPT is Going to Get Better at Math Google Bard’s Reasoning Skills Improve by 30% Bard Goes Local and Multimodal Intuit Has a Big Generative AI Vision for Small Businesses Jasper Campaigns Introduces Enterprise AI Writing Features Quora’s Poe Expands Generative AI Q&A Instacart Offers ChatGPT-powered Shopping Assistant OpenAI Will Distribute $1M in Cybersecurity Grants <a href= "https://venturebeat.com/ai/mckinsey-says-about-half-of-its-employees-are-using-generative-ai/#:~:text=McKinsey%20says%20'about%20half'%20of%20its%20empl
S1 E329 · Thu, June 08, 2023
Aleksandr Tiulkanov on AI Policy, Laws, Regulation, and What We Really Need from Government
Aleksandr Tuilkanov is a lawyer specializing in AI policy, regulation, and legal frameworks. Early work in GDPR and AI regulation before the generative AI frenzy led him to be hired by several governments to help draft AI policy. Few people that have focused on AI policy exclusively or a significant period of time, and his insights are grounded in that experience. His work was influential at the Council of Europe, a key player in the latest EU AI regulatory framework. We talk about imitation vs inappropriate use of data, appropriationism, whether chatbots are capable of defamation, copyright, IP protection, and what the real level of urgency is around regulating generative AI. We also talk about his recent colorfully-titled post, "Let's not bomb the AI data centers just yet." Aleksandr Tiulkanov is an AI, data, and digital policy counsel. He earned his law degree at the University of Edinburgh and has specialized in AI regulation since 2015. He is a former senior manager at Deloitte, where he worked with corporations on AI policies. He later worked for several governments, including the Council of Europe, to design their AI policy and regulatory frameworks. He is currently a researcher at the Center for International Intellectual Property Studies and working independently with government agencies on AI policy.
S1 E328 · Sun, June 04, 2023
Generative AI News - A Lawyer's ChatGPT Debacle, Nvidia, OpenAI, Runway, TikTok, Spotify, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 328
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for June 1, 2023, is here. We have some special segments for you today with hosts Eric Schwartz from Voicebot.ai and Bret Kinsella. These include: An Nvidia video demo of a humanlike conversation with an in-game non-player character Live demos of Bing search inside of ChatGPT and Google Bard’s similarity A short video showing how the Google Search Generative Experience beta release works. Eric and Bret also introduced a new segment, generative AI winners and losers of the week . I am sure you will find that to be a fun addition to the show. ***Note: There are a couple of videos that we ran on the live video stream that did not record properly, so there were removed from the audio. Generative AI News This week’s top stories include multiple NVIDIA announcements, OpenAI’s new AI reasoning capabilities, Runway’s big payday and Google’s investment, Spotify voice clones may be coming, TikTok tests a generative AI-powered assistant, how search is changing, and, of course, the lawyer’s ChatGPT debacle. Please double-click on the video above and give us a like 👍. I’d appreciate the help with YouTube’s AI black box algorithms. 😀🎉🚀 Links related to the top stories are included below in case you’d like to explore the news in more detail. Let me know what you think about this week’s topics and commentary. Nvidia ACE for Games Brings Humanlike Conversation to NPCs Nvidia WPP Collaboration OpenAI’s Improved Mathematical Reasoning Google SGE First Look at Conversational Search to Rival ChatGPT and Bing Chat Perplexity Adds New Copilot Features and an Android App Runway Just Netted $100 in Cash and a New Giant Valuation TikTok Starts Testing Generative AI Chatbot Tako <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/202
S1 E327 · Fri, June 02, 2023
Robert Scoble on Apple, Siri, ChatGPT, Virtual Companions, AR/VR, and a Lifetime in Silicon Valley
Robert Scoble did the first live stream of a ride in a Tesla. The driver was Elon Musk. The Siri mobile app launched to the world in his living room. He is the leading author on spatial computing, is an AR/VR expert, and has seen a lot of technology innovation up close over the years. He and I caught up at Project Voice in April for a live interview right after he interviewed the three Siri co-founders onstage. In addition to his comments on the evolution of tech and Silicon Valley over the past 30 years, we also go deep on ChatGPT and Apple. His take on ChatGPT and the rise of AI companions is intriguing. He also offers insight into what he expects Apple to launch this year, maybe even in the next week at WWDC - a new Siri with AR and generative AI capabilities. The leaks we saw this week in the media confirm he has some inside knowledge of what is coming. Robert Scoble was a Futurist at Rackspace Hosting, an evangelist and strategist at Microsoft, and an executive at several startups. He started as a journalist and ran several high-profile tech conferences in the 1990s. He is also the author of The Infinite Retina and The Fourth Transformation.
S1 E326 · Tue, May 30, 2023
Generative AI News - AI Copilot for Lawyers Exclusive, ChatGPT App, Opera, Photoshop, Tesla and More
Your Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for May 25, 2023, is here. Spellbook’s Scott Stevenson joined Eric Schwartz from Voicebot.ai and Bret Kinsella (that’s me) to discuss the news and his company’s $10.9 million funding round. We have some exclusives for you if you want to hear the latest about the OpenAI GPT-powered lawyer copilot from Spellbook. These include the surprising number of lawyers that signed up in April and the enormous customer onboarding backlog. Plus, Spellbook is hiring aggressively right now. Generative AI News Beyond the live interview segment with Spellbook, we also cover new ChatGPT features on desktop and in the iOS app, additional comments on key Microsoft announcements from this week, news from Adobe, Opera, Hugging Face, and Google. In addition, we have two interesting stories about Tesla, one involving robots and the other deepfakes. So, that should hold your attention. Please double-click on the video above and give us a like 👍. I’d appreciate the help with YouTube’s AI black box algorithms. 😀🎉🚀 Links related to the top stories are included below in case you’d like to explore the news in more detail. Let me know what you think about this week’s topics and commentary. Legal Generative AI Assistant Spellbook Raises $10.9 Million Anthropic Closes $450 Million in Funding ChatGPT’s iOS App Demo and Highlights Microsoft Announcements About AI Copilots, Plugins, and ChatGPT Signal a Market Shift Opera Unveils Native Browser Generative AI Service Aria Adobe Brings Firefly Generative AI to Photoshop Hugging Face Introduces Generative AI Coding Assistant StarCoder The AI Code Generation Battles Heat Up with Google Codey Debut Watch Tesla’s Humanoid Robots Walk into the Future <a href= "https://synthedia.substack.com/p/d
S1 E325 · Tue, May 30, 2023
GAIN Special - Microsoft Build 2023 Generative AI Announcements on ChatGPT, Copilots, Bing, and More
Microsoft Build 2023 was more hotly anticipated than Apple WWDC which is hard to believe. However, that is the new reality created by ChatGPT and OpenAI's partnership with Microsoft. In this special episode of the generative AI news rundown, (GAIN), Voicebot's Bret Kinsella and Eric Schwartz break down the five top announcements from the event and the implications for users and for the market. Topics include: Bing Search coming to ChatGPT Microsoft adopted ChatGPT Plugin model for Bing, GPT AI models on Azure, and for other applications Window AI Copilot is coming GitHub Copilot is adding an AI-chat interface Azure OpenAI Studio will let any company build their own copilot We cover a few more topics as well. MORE ABOUT GAIN The show is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12 noon ET on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel . You can also view this entire podcast on YouTube or just listen here. Whatever works best for you. Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn . Also, please participate in an upcoming live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout and may even show your comment on screen.
S1 E324 · Wed, May 24, 2023
Adam Cheyer Co-founder of Siri and Viv Labs on Assistants, AI, and ChatGPT
My guest today is a giant in the world of voice assistants and AI. Adam Cheyer is the co-founder of Siri, which was originally an app that, as you know, was acquired by Apple and launched as the key feature of the iPhone 4s in 2011. That is how Siri came to define expectations for modern-day voice assistants. However, Cheyer and one of his Siri cofounders Dag Kittlaus, were disappointed that Apple decided to dramatically narrow the scope of the assistant to better align with its goal of making Siri a feature of the iPhone as opposed to a general purpose assistant. Cheyer and Kittlaus founded Viv Labs, which eventually sold to Samsung and, after a few years, became the technology behind the new Bixby after Samsung's initial voice assistant flopped. A key part of the story here is that Cheyer was the visionary behind 50% of the four leading voice assistants to emerge over the past 15 years. You can imagine that gives him unique insights into what is happening today with the rise of generative AI and ChatGPT in particular. Cheyer and I speak at length about his initial reaction to ChatGPT, what he thinks OpenAI got right, and foreshadows an emerging issue about how the company applies Plugins. In addition, you will want to hear more about Cheyer's four critical elements for an assistant and the difference between a knowing and doing assistant. This creates a stark contrast between ChatGPT and Alexa. Sit back and get ready for some gems of insight.
S1 E323 · Sat, May 20, 2023
Generative AI News 15 - AI Virtual Girlfriend, OpenAI on Capitol Hill, Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, Zoom, and More - Voicebot Podcast 323
Here is the Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for May 18, 2023. Eric Schwartz from Voicebot.ai and Bret Kinsella break down the biggest industry stories of the week. Some of those stories include OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, Zoom, Gather, and an AI virtual girlfriend that went viral. - Has Alexa been generative AI all along? Amazon says so, sort of. But is it true? - Are we emerging from the AI Autopilot Era to the Copilot Era with more human control? Satya Nadella says so. But is it true? Links related to the top stories are included below in case you’d like to explore the news in more detail. Let me know what you think about this week’s topics and commentary. AI Virtual Girlfriend Nets $72K in its first week Amazon surpasses 500M Alexa devices, but do its claims of generative AI leadership ring true? OpenAI’s Sam Altman wows U.S. Senators, asks them to regulate AI Satya Nadella says the AI copilot era is more human friendly than the AI autopilot era Anthropic introduces a giant LLM context window Zoom to add Anthropic to its feature set Gather raises $20M for opensource generative AI Meta has new generative AI tools for advertisers ChatGPT Pluse subscribers now have access to Plugins! More About GAIN The show is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12 noon ET on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel . You can also view this entire podcast on YouTube or just listen here. Whatever works best for you. Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn . Also, please participate in an upcoming live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout a
S1 E322 · Sat, May 20, 2023
Generative AI News - Google Bard and Other IO Announcements, Bing Chat, The White House, Wendy's, and More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for May 11, 2023, is here. Special guest and Google Developer Expert (GDE) Allen Firstenberg joined me to go in-depth on all the Google I/O stories. We discuss Bard, extensions, conversational search, the PaLM and Gemini models, and much more. We also review the “Google Has No [generative AI] Moat” memo. That is followed by a discussion of Wendy’s adoption of Google PaLM for drive-thru order taking, Bing Chat going general availability worldwide, the White House’s efforts around AI, and a developer that created mini-Trip Advisor website targeting families with children with 2370 activities in 237 cities, 2,600 images, and nearly 250,000 words. He did this in two days and spent $53. The implications are significant. I hope you enjoy the show. Don’t miss Allen’s commentary on these items in the video. Given his role as a GDE and independent ambassador for several Google technologies, he has particularly interesting insights into Google’s moves, lack of progress on many fronts, and unrecognized progress on others. Bard Breakdown Top Google I/O Announcements Wendy’s Chooses Google PaLM for Drive-thru Automation Google Has No Moat [READ THIS!] Bing Chat Now Available to Everyone The White House Brings in AI Leaders and Announces New Research Labs A Developer Shows How to Re-create Trip Advisor with ChatGPT and DALL-E More About GAIN GAIN is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12 noon ET on Thursdays. You can re-watch each week’s discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel if you'd like to see the visuals and the host's beaming visage. Please join us live next week on YouTube or LinkedIn. Also, participate in the live show by commenting, and we are likely to give you a shoutout and may even show your comment on screen.
S1 E321 · Thu, May 11, 2023
Dag Kittlaus CEO of Riva Health and Co-founder of Siri and Viv Labs
Dag Kittlaus is the CEO and co-founder of Riva Health, a company that has set out to revolutionize how patients manage hypertension and heart disease. We discuss the innovation behind Riva, which turns a smartphone into a health management assistant that collects data and connects patients with a proactive care team. Hearing Dag talk, you can see how this might extend into traditional assistant functionality for managing chronic heart conditions. He breaks down the Riva journey thus far and we go back into his history as a co-founder of Siri (acquired by Apple) and Viv Labs (acquired by Samsung) and what he learned along the way about assistants, technology, and how users interact with novel solutions. We also go into depth on the rise of generative AI and ChatGPT. From a ChatGPT perspective, we spent considerable time discussing the new Plugins model to integrate third-party services. Kittlaus was doing this for the Siri app 15 years ago before the Apple acquisition. He did it again with Viv Labs and Samsung's Bixby assistant and knows the challenges of creating a plugin ecosystem. His observation is that the problems are largely the same and OpenAI is in for a rude awakening. I am sure you will enjoy this wide-ranging discussion about innovation, technology adoption, and overcoming barriers to growth with someone that has been influential in shaping our views, experiences, and assumptions about intelligent assistants of all kinds.
S1 E320 · Tue, May 09, 2023
Generative AI News - ChatGPT Plugins, Deep Floyd from Stability AI, Samsung, PwC, Deepfakes, Star Wars and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 320
We have a breakdown of the week's top generative AI news stories and what they mean for the industry. Today's hosts are Bret Kinsella , Voicebot.ai's Eric Schwartz , and industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang . The top stories just this week in a generative AI galaxy that is very, very near include: Unleashing a Synthetic Force Wes Anderson’s Star Wars: In a galaxy not so far away, director Caleb Ward unleashed a one-minute cinematic masterpiece that sent millions of Twitter and YouTube users into a frenzy, dividing the fandom with the power of ironic humor. Aided by the formidable force of AI allies, Midjourney and ChatGPT, our hero Ward swiftly crafted this viral sensation destined to echo through the corridors of cyberspace. Augie Shoots for the Stars: In a realm where time is of the essence, an industry analyst harnesses the power of the enigmatic Augie to forge a captivating tale in a mere 15 minutes. This alliance breathes life into the epic saga of a brave girl's conquest of the big city, forging a triumphant path through adversity and ultimately, success. Stable Expansion to the Outer Rim The Rise of the Models: In a galaxy where AI reigns supreme, Stability AI unveils two powerful allies : Deep Floyd IF, a text-to-image wizard skilled in rendering text with unparalleled accuracy, and Stable Vicuna, an open-source chatbot prodigy trained through the ancient art of reinforced learning from human feedback. Cohere Looks for Clear Trade Lanes Star Words. The Text Awakens: In a sector riddled with fierce competition, Cohere's valuation soars to an impressive $2 billion amidst a cosmic $250 million funding round. As they forge their unique path among the stars, Cohere's unwavering focus on text-based LLMs and business-oriented applications sets them apart from the likes of OpenAI and Stability AI, giving them a chance to become the galaxy's leading alternative LLM option. The Enterprise Strikes Back Rise of the Generative Alliance: In a bold move to conquer the cosmos of generative AI, business services titan <a href= "https://voicebot.a
S1 E319 · Fri, May 05, 2023
Lee Mallon on Recreating Trip Advisor with ChatGPT and DALL-E for $53 and Other Adventures
Lee Mallon is a CTO, developer, and technical advisor for AI and complex software projects. He created a hotel brand and brochure with his daughter using generative AI in just 7 hours. That project inspired him to see how quickly he could recreate a Trip Advisor for family travel activities website using generative AI. It took him two days and cost $53 to publish a website with over 2k activities, 2.6k images, and nearly 250k words. Learn how Lee did this, some tips, and what he sees next for automating digital experiences.
S1 E318 · Sun, April 30, 2023
AI at Mobile World Congress - D-ID, SK Telecom, MyManu, and VUI
Mobile World Congress 2023 had a lot of AI solutions on display. D-ID's Yaniv Levy talked about a new streaming API for its virtual human solution paving the way for real-time and dynamic interactive digital people. Don't miss the second segment with SK Telecom's Youngsup Shin. It is about A., (that's pronounced A [dot]), a virtual assistant that is also a personal companion. A. has 1 million users in its beta period, is based on a large language model (LLM), and has some features similar to ChatGPT. MyManu is a new hearables headset connected to the 4G cellular network so you can access the internet without your smartphone. It is coming to market later this year and company founder Danny Manu offers us a sneak peek. We finish up with Patrick Esslinger, the co-founder of VUI Agency. He shares what his team has learned about voice assistant experience design and how those solutions are evolving. 6:03 - D-ID streaming virtual humans 20:10 - SK Telecom on A. virtual companion 34:15 - MyManu about Titan, a new hearables solution 47:10 - VUI Agency on voice assistant experience design
S1 E317 · Sat, April 29, 2023
Generative AI News - New ChatGPT Features, HuggingChat, Google, Deepfakes, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 317
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 27, 2023, is here. Another week of breaking news has piled up, and we have a breakdown of the top stories and what they mean for the industry. The developments include news from ChatGPT, HuggingFace, Google, Nvidia, Sensory, Hour One, D-ID, deepfake musicians, and more. Your hosts today are Bret Kinsella and Voicebot.ai's Eric Schwartz . The top stories in generative AI land this week include: ChatGPT En Fuego Plugging in a new vision: Greg Brockman from OpenAI demonstrated some new ChatGPT plugin features; several are jaw-dropping . The “super app” virtual assistant we were promised: Brockman’s demo and the discussion about the product philosophy offer an insight into where ChatGPT is headed. Move over, Alexa. Get out of the way, Siri. ChatGPT may be the virtual assistant we have always wanted . ChatGPT is anything but incognito: While everything ChatGPT seems to play out in the public eye, OpenAI recognized that not every user wanted every one of their chat conversations saved in perpetuity and used for future model training. Incognito (i.e., private chatting) is now available, and a “business mode” is coming soon. HuggingChat Embraces Open Source Open source competition for ChatGPT: Hugging Face stepped up and provided a ChatGPT alternative built on open source models and data. It’s a smaller AI model than ChatGPT and is pretty good. Deepfake Entertainment Drake, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, and Rihanna go viral: Viral hits from big stars are common. Deepfake viral hits mimicking the voice, style, and likeness of big stars may also become common. ghostwrider777 strikes again! Joe Rogan comments run deep: New deepfakes mimicking Joe Rogan’s podcast have the comedian and commentator talking about a “ slippery ” slope. Grimes jumps on board: The musical artist says she will split royalties 50/50 with anyone deepfaking her voice. She has no label and no binding legal constraints giving her more flexibility tha
S1 E316 · Sat, April 29, 2023
Generative AI News - StableLM, Elon Musk, Drake Deepfake, and More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 20, 2023, was recorded live at the Model Mania conference, which focused on enterprise generative AI solutions. News this week has more on Elon Musk and some surprising news from Stability AI. We also talk about a deepfake of Drake and The Weeknd that went viral, Adobe Firefly, Atlassian, ChatGPT in government legal actions, Universal Music lawsuits, and more. Bret Kinsella hosted this week with his Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz . The top stories in generative AI land this week include: StableLM and Stable Diffusion XL Big Data LLM : Stability AI introduced a new large language model trained on 1.5 trillion data tokens . It’s open-source and comes in a variety of model parameter sizes. Stable Diffusion for the Enterprise : The new XL model from Stability AI offers better photorealism, more coherent text, and is positioned for enterprise use. Oh, and the company’s valuation may have risen from $1B to $4B in less than six months. Adobe Firefly for Video Generative AI for designers and video makers : Adobe Firefly will make it easier for designers to incorporate generative AI into their workflow. The new services for video production will take that to a new level in Premiere and After Effects. Atlassian Intelligence In-Context Search and Answers : The creator of Jira, Confluence, and Trello has added generative AI features for summarization, text generation, and question-answering from your productivity software data. Elon Musk and X.ai What is Elon up to now : Musk created a new company in Nevada last month called X.ai . He says he wants to create a third option beyond OpenAI and Google offerings. Justice Dept Mentions ChatGPT Name recognition on another level: The U.S. Justice Department’s suit against Google for alleged search monopolization
S1 E315 · Sat, April 29, 2023
Generative AI News - Charles Barkley Deepfake, Elon Musk, Hugging Face and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 315
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 13, 2023, included some breaking news on Amazon Bedrock, the new service competing directly with OpenAI and Microsoft’s Azure AI services. We also discussed Twitter’s generative AI ambitions, HuggingGPT, a positive generative AI launch from MailChimp and a lackluster implementation by Expedia, OpenAI’s bug bounty, the Italy ChatGPT saga, a deepfake of Charles Barkley, Alibab’s everything AI bot, and a bit more. Bret Kinsella (that’s me) hosted again this week with my Voicebot.ai colleague Eric Schwartz . The top stories in generative AI land this week include: Amazon Takes on OpenAI & Microsoft A multivendor Bedrock approach: Amazon Bedrock now offers easy access to many generative AI models, including AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Stability AI, and Titan. Copilot gets a competitor: Amazon’s CodeWhisperer , a text-to-code generator, is now general availability and free. GitHub Copilot may have a market share lead with 400,000 paying subscribers, but free is a good way to accumulate users. Elon Musk Goes Shopping Twitter and Generative AI: Elon Musk has reportedly purchased 10,000 GPUs after he was out recruiting some well-known AI researchers. So, why did he want OpenAI and others to pause their AI research? We’ll see. Musk may want Twitter to be an “everything app,” and generative AI would be a key element. Or, he may just want advertisers to have a useful feature. HuggingGPT and Multi-Model Systems Microsoft’s latest take on hybrid AI: Microsoft researchers released a paper and a GitHub repository with a new multi-model LLM controller (orchestrator) that can govern access to a variety of AI models for a single interface called HuggingGPT . We will see more of these multi-model services. MailChimp Gets AI Copywriter Building on the core product: MailChimp added AI writing capabilities via an OpenAI integration. It looks like a clean, on-point generative AI feature. There is no extra cost for the feature right now, but at what point will the companies start passing along the model inference costs to users? Expedia Misses the Plot Generating misperception: <a href= "https://synt
S1 E314 · Fri, April 28, 2023
Nico Perony Director of AI Research at Unity - Voicebot Podcast Ep 314
Nico Perony is the director of AI research at the game development platform Unity. He was a co-founder and CTO of OTO, which was acquired by Unity in 2021. OTO was a pioneer in emotional intelligence for conversation data. It was known for "Enabling emotional intelligence everywhere, so human and artificial intelligence can interact with awareness and empathy." Perony led the integration of OTO technology into the Unity platform and, more recently, has focused on new conversation AI features and generative AI tooling for game developers. He previously was the founder of Slow Motion Projects and an engineer at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. Perony has a PhD in complex systems and a Master's degree in electrical engineering.
S1 E313 · Fri, April 07, 2023
Generative AI News - ChatGPT Gets Banned, Deepfakes Get Provenance, Bing Chat Gets Ads, Meta, Canva & More
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for April 6, 2023, focused on regulators and OpenAI, ChatGPT’s popularity compared to the iPhone, deepfake disclosure, authentication and ownership, monetizing those generative AI models, what’s Meta doing, and more. Bret Kinsella (that’s me) hosts this week with guests Nina Schick , the author of the 2020 book Deepfakes, and Eric Schwartz , head writer at Voicebot.ai. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: ChatGPT Gets Banned A time-out chair for OpenAI and some unfortunate users : Italy took action . Canada opened an investigation . France received complaints. Germany and Ireland indicated they’d like to get involved. Regulators have OpenAI in their sights. How will it go down? ChatGPT vs. Alexa vs. iPhone Compared to what? : ChatGPT is a phenomenon, but how does it stack up to the hype of earlier products? We compare ChatGPT to some notable break-out hits. Deepfake Solutions Provenance in the unreal valley : It’s a deepfake, but you want to disclose its synthetic origins. You also want to show its history and ownership. How about a cryptographic signature from Truepic that tracks the life of the digital artifact? The unbearable likeness of your being : Those amazingly lifelike avatars don’t have a clear ownership model today. Someone could make a deepfake of you, and what recourse do you have? However, if you owned the copyright to your digital likeness… Bing Chat Ads Arrive Paying for those GPT-4 inference costs : We knew they were coming, and now we know what they look like, at least one format. Bing Chat has ads that look a lot like what you see in web searches today, with a twist. Generative AI definitely has a revenue model. Meta Gets Objective Alignment is king : Meta rolled out another researcher-only generative AI model. However, this time it
S1 E312 · Fri, April 07, 2023
Should We Pause AI Research? Muddu Sudhakar and Bret Kinsella Break Down the Musk Letter
The Future of Life Institute, an organization funded by the Musk Foundation, issued a letter calling for a pause of "giant AI experiments" for six months. Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, AI legend Yoshua Bengio, and many thousands of others signed the letter. The idea behind the letter is that the risks posed by AI models such as GPT-4 are potentially so high that we must give policy-makers and technology leaders a chance to assess what guardrails are necessary. But is this a good idea? What are the risks of a pause? What are the objectives and conflicts of interest of the people that signed the letter? Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of Aisera, joined me to talk about the letter and all of the discussion it has sparked. We also discussed some alternative approaches, common misunderstandings, and how generative AI is rapidly changing assumptions about our world. Sudhakar previously appeared on Voicebot Podcast episode 280. He is a former senior VP and GM at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMWare, and Pivotal. He was CEO at Caspida when the company was acquired by Splunk, where he assumed leadership for machine learning, AI, and analytics-based solutions. Sudhakar was also the CEO and founder of the big data startup Cetas, which was acquired by VMWare, and founded Sanera Systems, which was acquired by Brocade/McData. He began his career as an engineer at IBM and SGI and earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA. Go Bruins!
S1 E311 · Wed, April 05, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown - ChatGPT, Google Rumors, Elon Musk, Zoom, Coke and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 311
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for March 30, 2023, had controversy, competition, Coca-Cola, and more. Is there a more dynamic market right now than generative AI? I don’t think so. This week’s show is hosted by Bret Kinsella with guests Silke Hahn , technology editor at Heise Online, and Eric Schwartz , head writer at Voicebot.ai. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: Musk Wants to Slow Down AI The Letter : A letter from the Future of Life Institue signed by Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque, and 17k others called for a six-month moratorium on “the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” But maybe this isn’t an entirely altruistic activity. Google Rumors and More Issues Haunted by ChatGPT : Google rumors pointed to the company using ChatGPT data in Bard training and efforts to combine DeepMind brains and Google AI team brains to catch up with OpenAI’s chatbot. The headlines don’t tell the real story. OpenAI Declares War and Defends the Citadel ChatGPT Plugins : OpenAI is adding plugins to ChatGPT. This puts everyone on notice that OpenAI is now an end-user application product provider and an AI model provider. ChatGPT Security : A serious ChatGPT security vulnerability was discovered by a security researcher and promptly patched by OpenAI. There is a bigger story here. Perplexity AI Lands Funding Conversational search wars : It’s not cheap to compete in the search business. Perplexity AI just raised $25.6 million to challenge Bing Chat and Google Bard for conversational search market share. Stanford Finds Its LLiMit Alpaca sent packing : Stanford University launched a web demo of its <a href= "https://voicebot.ai/2023/03/27/stanfo
S1 E310 · Sat, April 01, 2023
Reghu Thanumalayan from Deutsche Telekom Talks Magenta and the Future of Voice Assistants - Voicebot Podcast Ep 310
Reghu Thanumalayan is a senior vice president at Deutsche Telekom and oversees the Magenta voice assistant. He was my featured guest in Voicebot Podcast Ep 148 three years ago. Reghu joined me to share an update on how things have evolved since launching the product in late 2019. Magenta has won awards, expanded integrations with TV and smart home devices, and introduced a new call center application. However, the company has also discontinued the smart speaker and learned some tough lessons. Reghu breaks down the journey and the learnings. We also talk about a new solution that sounds likely to be a breakout consumer hit and where voice assistants truly excel. This interview was conducted onsite at Mobile World Congress 2023 at the Deutsche Telekom booth.
S1 E309 · Sat, March 25, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 7 - Nvidia, Google, Midjourney, TikTok, Roblox, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 309
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for March 23, 2023, was packed with significant announcements. Bret Kinsella hosts this week along with Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: Nvidia Moves up the Stack Picasso and NeMo: Nvidia isn’t going just to cash checks for GPU sales related to the generative AI tsunami. They now offer text-to-image and text-to-text models that compete directly with OpenAI, Google, and Stable Diffusion. Omniverse Upgrade: Omniverse is an open platform for 3D design collaboration and real-time physically accurate simulations. It announced new services for creating virtual factories mirroring real-world facilities, the option to stream simulated experiences and train to AI-powered robots, and a simulator for testing autonomous vehicles. Google Teases Gen AI Features and Models Show your PaLMs: Google is now letting testers use its giant large language model (LLM) PaLM . This is different from LaMDA and might eventually be a replacement for the brains behind Bard. Right now, it is Google’s answer to GPT-3/GPT-4. A tool to help developers using PaLM called MakerSuite was also announced. Gmail and Docs to Get AI writing assistant: Docs and Gmail are getting PaLM-enabled text generation features. Bard announced again: Google says it is now offering access to Bard to the general public. But there is a waitlist . AI-Generated Beauty Midjourney 5 is here: There are several minor upgrades, but the key benefits are enhanced quality, more coherence, better photorealism, and more detail. Bing adds DALL-E: You can now create images in Bing through a new DALL-E integration. The quality seems better to me than DALL-E 2, which you can access today on OpenAI. Might this be the long-awaited DALL-E 3? Synthetic Media Policy TikTok to tighten deepfake rules: TikTok announced new policies around synthetic media and deepfake use on the platform before its CEO’s Congressional testimony. The policy description grew from 30 words to nearly 400. Will others social platforms take this as a cue to make their own updates?
S1 E308 · Mon, March 20, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 6 - GPT-4, MS 365 Copilot, Google, South Park, and More - Voicebot Podcast 308
The Generative AI News (GAIN) rundown for March 16, 2023, required some tough decisions. So much happened this week that we zeroed in on the biggest stories and how they will shape the market. We might get to some of the others, like Midjourney 5, next week. In this episode, Bret Kinsella hosts along with Eric Schwartz. The top stories in generative AI land this week include: Generative AI for Knowledge Workers Microsoft 365 Copilot : A natural language assistant that is a system and not just a bunch of bolt-on LLM features. Can it live up to the ambition? It’s definitely impressive. Google Workspace : Some generative AI features are coming to Google Docs and Gmail. Still closed access and little detail, but an official signal about new features. Also, the approach today is less ambitious than Microsoft's. The Long Wait is Over GPT-4 is Here : The much-hyped and long-awaited GPT-4 launch finally arrived. It is multimodal with a vision input element, but that is not widely available. However, the output quality is clearly better, OpenAI claims that factuality is higher and hallucinations rarer, and the context window quadrupled. ChatGPT Contenders Take a Step Forward Anthropic Claude : The ChatGPT competitor was formally announced . However, there is still a waitlist! Quora to Monetize Poe : Quora might face an existential crisis as answers become easier to find with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the New Bing. However, Poe doesn’t rely on one LLM. It allows the user to access many. And Quora is charging for access . LLMs and Popular Culture ChatGPT on South Park : The latest South Park episode featured ChatGPT. When new enterprise technology starts showing up in iconic popular culture venues, something important is happening. Plus, this is just funny. More About GAIN The GAIN Rundown was originally broadcast live on YouTube and LinkedIn, and we also added it to the Voicebot Podcast for your convenience. If you would like to watch the show live join us on YouTube or LinkedIn at 12 noon EST on T
S1 E307 · Fri, March 10, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 5 - Slack, Salesforce, OpenAI, Grammarly, AI21, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 307
The top generative AI news (GAIN) of the week is back for March 9, 2023. This week, Bret Kinsella hosts along with Eric Schwartz from Voicebot.ai and our guest, Brandon Kaplan, chief innovation officer at Journey, and the founder of Skilled Creative. Stories in generative AI land this week include: Enterprise apps all in on LLMs SlackGPT : A new ChatGPT feature for Slack developed by OpenAI Salesforce GPT : Einstein GPT features that Salesforce rolled out this week Grammarly GPT : Grammarly also adds generative AI features for its 30 million users, putting it on a collision course with Jasper AI, AI21's Wordtune, and Microsoft. The Evolution of Search Answer Box Mania : Both Brave and DuckDuckGo have new search summarization features that appear to replicate the Google answer box. The companies are applying LLMs, but the features are not nearly as ambitious as Bing or Bard. What they do show is how quickly the search experience is changing. Larger Language Models Large, Larger, and Largest : AI21 Labs , a competitor to OpenAI, announced some new, larger, and more polished large language models. The announcement was accompanied by a number of new APIs for a variety of LLM features that developers can access by the drink. Talk with ChatGPT ChatGPT Gets a Face : We also have D-ID's new virtual human-led chat that enables you to have a conversation with ChatGPT-enabled avatar. This discussion included a conversation about the role of virtual humans in interactive bot experiences. Elon Musk Rumors A Singular Generative AI : We finish with a discussion
S1 E306 · Fri, March 10, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 4 - OpenAI ChatGPT API, Snapchat, Spotify, Meta LLaMA, and More
If you want to get caught up on the top generative AI news of the week, Eric Schwartz and Andrew Herndon from Voicebot.ai and Synthedia break down the top headlines for the first week in March 2023. On tap this week in the video (with links if you want to read more): ChatGPT API Snap My AI Spotify AI DJ New Bing in Windows 11 Meta joins the LLM wars…sort of More About GAIN The Generative AI News (GAIN) Rundown is recorded live and streamed via YouTube and LinkedIn at 12 noon EST on Thursdays. Join us live if you can make it. You can re-watch the discussion on Voicebot’s YouTube channel .
S1 E305 · Wed, March 08, 2023
Eric Schwartz from Voicebot Compares Large Language Model Performance - Voicebot Podcast Ep 305
Eric Schwartz, head writer at Voicebot.ai , joins me today to talk about some of his key learnings from a recent set of tests he conducted with ten different large language model based writing assistants. In particular, he will break down what the market looks like today in terms of the LLM suppliers and how the AI writing assistants compare across several use cases. In this interview, he compares AI21 Labs, ChatGPT, and GPT-3 models. This interview was originally recorded at the Synthedia 2 event at the end of 2022. It is also available in Voicebot's YouTube channel at youtube.com/@voicebotai . You might enjoy checking that out now or after listening today because we share on screen several of the writing sample outputs discussed in the interview. Also, when you are there, please give a Like and Subscribe to the channel.
S1 E304 · Tue, February 28, 2023
Marc Scarpa CEO of DeFiance Media Talks About Launched the First Digital Human News Anchor - Voicebot Podcast Ep 304
DeFiance Media is a video news platform that provides coverage of decentralized culture, technology, and finance. It was founded by CEO, Marc Scarpa in 2021. Scarpa is well known as an innovator in participatory broadcasts. He was the founder of JumpCut in the 1990s which was known for producing Woodstock 99, three of the Tibetan Freedom Concerts, and Artisan Entertainment's Blair Witch WebFestival. Earlier in his career, he was the New York Bureau Chief for CNET TV. He also worked for YouTube, Olgilvy and Global Environment Media. In today's discussion, Scarpa talks about the idea behind launching a new live news media broadcaster, native to the web but also leveraging over-the-top broadcast distribution channels directly to consumer televisions. He also goes into detail about what it takes to launch the world's first virtual human newscaster, Roxanna. He also goes into detail about what he has learned after 1,500 broadcasts led by a digital persona, and how that complements the dozens of human broadcasters on the network.
S1 E303 · Tue, February 28, 2023
Bakz T. Future Breaks Down the Past Present and Future of ChatGPT and OpenAI - Voicebot Podcast Ep 303
In today's interview, Bakz T. Future walks through the history of OpenAI, where recent developments behind ChatGPT originated, the rise of DALL-E, image generators, and other generative AI technologies. Bakz because is both an everyday user of these technologies as well as a developer that works directly with the OpenAI APIs, so you are going to learn a lot today. Get ready for a discussion about InstructGPT and how that upgrade in February 2022 was instrumental to all of the recent mania around generative AI. He also discusses the importance of using adversarial thinking when using generative AI models, particularly large language models, and he finishes up with some predictions for 2023. There is also a video of this episode in Voicebot's YouTube channel if you would prefer to watch. Just go to youtube.com/@voicebotai . While you are there look around at the more than 100 videos we have posted since June of last year on AI technologies. And, of course, give us a click to subscribe.
S1 E302 · Sun, February 26, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 3 - Bing Boomerang, OpenAI Foundry, GitHub Copilot, Roblox and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 302
Welcome to our third edition of GAIN, the generative AI news rundown. On tap today, we lead off with the Bing Boomerang. After some negative press about Bing Chat Mode going off the rails, Bing put some tight restrictions on usage to reduce the risk of generating inappropriate content. Then it reversed itself a few days later. OpenAI Foundry is a new set of tools for enterprise users, GitHub Copilot got an update with new code completion and info security features. In addition, we saw Huggingface partner with Amazon Web Services to host generative AI models and Roblox outlined a generative AI future for game developers. Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai is the lead host this week, while Michal Stanislawek for #voicelunch, Utter.one, and Hearme.ai, joins him as co-host. Links to the main stories include: Bing puts on the breaks and reverses course: https://voicebot.ai/2023/02/22/microsoft-restricts-then-relaxes-eases-bings-generative-ai-chat-over-4-days/ OpenAI to offer more customization: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/openai-to-offer-chatgpt-customization OpenAI Foundry: https://voicebot.ai/2023/02/23/openais-new-foundry-program-offers-llm-clients-dedicated-processing-fine-tune-controls/ Hugging Face partners with AWS: https://voicebot.ai/2023/02/21/generative-ai-startup-hugging-face-picks-aws-to-host-future-large-language-models/ GitHub Copilot: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/github-copilot-just-made-itself-even Roblox to add generative AI features for game development: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/roblox-to-add-generative-ai-tools You can also watch the show's live recording on Voicebot's YouTube Channel . Follow Bret Kinsella on LinkedIn to get notified of future live recordings.
S1 E301 · Wed, February 22, 2023
Chandra Khatri CTO of Got-It AI on Automated Truth Checking and Generative AI - Voicebot Podcast Ep 301
Chandra Khatri is CTO and co-founder of Got-It AI, a company that built an AI that builds conversational AI solutions. It can ingest existing conversation data and automatically generate an intent model and conversation flows that designers can edit in a no-code platform. That same technology was more recently applied to checking the output of GPT-3. Known as CheckGPT or Truth Checker, it verifies the truthfulness of large language model outputs, one of the key concerns of enterprise users of generative AI. Khatri earned a master's degree in machine learning in 2015 and took that knowledge to eBay, where he implemented a generative AI solution for automatically creating product listings. He then went to work in Amazon's Lab126 where he was a founding team member that launched the Alexa Prize.
S1 E300 · Sat, February 18, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown 2 - Bing's Wild Side, Bard Alert, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 300
We had another big week in generative AI news. The testers of the new Bing Chat Mode made some disturbing discoveries, but Microsoft also made some changes and revealed a 71% approval rate by early users. Google is pulling out all of the stops to get Bard tested and ready for launch, while Jasper AI and Vertione introduced new generative AI enterprise solutions. And we had Opera and Yext provide new evidence that web browsing and SEO are about to change. Voicebot.ai's Bret and Kinsella, and Eric Schwartz break down the news, provide updates, and put the developments in context, all while answering questions from the live audience. Links to stories: Bing Chat Mode: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/bing-chat-goes-wild-with-hallucinations Google Bard Code Red: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/google-asks-employees-to-rewrite-bards-incorrect-responses-to-queries.html Jasper AI goes enterprise: https://voicebot.ai/2023/02/14/jasper-introduces-generative-ai-api-and-enterprise-tools/ Veritone's new generative AI enterprise applications: https://voicebot.ai/2023/02/16/veritone-releases-generative-ai-features-to-fuel-entertainment-and-advertising/ Opera's GPT-3 features: https://synthedia.substack.com/p/how-llms-will-change-web-browsing You can also watch the show's live recording on Voicebot's YouTube Channel . Follow Bret Kinsella on LinkedIn to get notified of future live recordings.
S1 E299 · Sat, February 18, 2023
Andrei Papancea CEO of NLX on Conversational Experiences, Customer Self-Service, and GPT-3 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 299
Andrei Papancea co-founded NLX in 2018 to solve some of the problems he faced as a software engineer working on natural language understanding at American Express. He worked extensively with designers and analysts that could not make improvements to customer self-service and conversational support channels without engaging software engineers to hardcode the changes. He was confident that you could build conversational systems that enabled non-technical users to make these changes. In addition, he was particularly interested in how conversational systems could be married with visual channels on the web and mobile to deliver even better customer self-service solutions. These ideas led to NLX, which is used by companies ranging from Copa Airlines to Red Bull. More recently, NLX integrated with GPT-3 to provide users with generative AI solutions to augment conversational customer experiences. He stopped by the Voicebot Podcast to discuss the origins of the company and how things have changed with NLX clients since the introduction of ChatGPT. He also breaks down how NLX's new GPT-3-powered features work and how he expects adoption to play out.
S1 E298 · Mon, February 13, 2023
Generative AI News Rundown with Bing, Bard, Deepfakes, OpenAI Data and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 298
A lot happened this week in the generative AI and synthetic media. Today introduces a new weekly (or when appropriate) addition to the Voicebot Podcast. The GAIN Rundown is the generative AI news of the week. So much is happening in this space and it is so important to the conversational AI industry, we thought that a short weekly rundown of the top headlines would be useful. Let us know what you think. The big news for this episode was Google's ChatGPT competitor Bard and Microsoft's debut of what we like to call BingGPT. We also saw schools banning ChatGPT and David Guetta show off an Eminem deepfake. The show starts off looking at some OpenAI data that you are likely to find interesting. If you would like to view the videos that we included in the discussion, you can see those segments on YouTube through the links below. 5:02 - Microsoft https://lnkd.in/gid_Gq4v 14:00 - Google https://lnkd.in/gZ6P8kCq 29:40 - David Guetta: https://lnkd.in/ghtNjsns Also, we are publishing these recorded videos on Voicebot's YouTube channel. If you would prefer to watch the discussion, subscribe to the channel and watch here: https://www.youtube.com/@voicebotai
S1 E297 · Fri, February 10, 2023
Karen Kaushansky Conversation Designer at Google Talks UX for Wearables, LLMs, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 297
Karen Kaushansky is a conversation designer at Google that led the Google Assistant UX design for WearOS and, more recently, for the Pixel Watch. While there has been a lot of attention around conversational UX on smart speakers and mobile phones, wearables introduce new variables and different mental models. Kaushansky goes into detail about designing voice experiences for the watch, what it's like to be an API or embedded in the software, how it's different when you also control the hardware or run software on the device, and more. The interview also discusses how conversation design has changed over the past 25 years. Kaushansky started in the industry in the 1990s and has seen many technology shifts over the years. This also enables us to update our discussion on multimodal interfaces, which was the focus of her appearance on episode 40 of the Voicebot Podcast five years ago. We finish up with a discussion about large language models and the role of conversation designers in applications built on generative AI technologies. She also offers a great tip for designers on navigating this change that is the center of so much discussion today. Kaushansky began her career as a speech technology designer at Nortel, then spent time at Nuance, Microsoft, and Jawbone. At Microsoft, she was part of the team that created Cortana and deployed it on the Windows phone. She joined Google in 2019 and has led user experience design for Google Assistant on a number of products.
S1 E296 · Mon, January 30, 2023
Gil Perry CEO of D-ID on Lifelike Digital People, Generative AI, and the Rise of Synthetic Media - Voicebot Podcast Ep 296
My guest is D-ID co-founder and CEO Gil Perry. We talk about how the company logically evolved into tools for creating talking digital people and how its capabilities in GANs and protecting consumers from facial recognition technology were the ingredients for a unique AI-based video solution. The company is well known for powering MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia product, which has animated over 100 million photographs for consumers. D-ID was also instrumental in helping Jean-Baptiste Martinoli win two film festival awards for his AI-generated short film in 2022. Last fall, the company introduced Creative Reality Studio. That solution enables anyone to upload someone's picture, add some text, and quickly create a scripted video with an avatar in the likeness of the photo. In December, D-ID added the ability to create the script using a prompt to GPT-3 and upload images created by Stable Diffusion. This is a great example of how synthetic media is often enhanced by layering several generative AI solutions together. The new use cases are also why these markets are the hottest in tech today. Perry, a former software developer that worked on the viral hit mobile apps Meerkat and HouseParty, offers an insider's view of the rapid rise and current trajectory of generative AI and synthetic media.
S1 E295 · Tue, January 24, 2023
Dustin Coates from Algolia Breaks Down Keyword, Concept, and Conversational Search Models - Voicebot Podcast Ep 295
The launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, spurred new interest in conversational search. For the first time in over a decade, many people are beginning to think about what comes after the Google search model that has become so familiar. Dustin Coates knows a lot about search. He is the principal product manager the implemented Algolia's voice search products and worked on the integration with OpenAI's GPT-3 in 2021. Algolia is a search giant in its own right, with over 17,000 customers using its website search capabilities instead of Google technology for 1.75 trillion annual searches. Coates walks through different types of search such as keyword, semantic, concept, and conversational. He breaks down how machine learning and AI are changing search models and performance. This includes a comparison between how Algolia, Google, ChatGPT, and other services handle search today. Coates also offers insights into where GPT-3 powered search does and does not work for its clients and why concept search has become so popular.
S1 E294 · Thu, January 19, 2023
Ori Goshen CEO of AI21 Labs on WordTune, the Large Language Model Revolution, and More - Voicebot Podcast Ep 294
"The adoption of large language models and generative AI is booming, and I think it began with creativity use cases. And now we are seeing as it slowly moving toward productivity use cases.... and that's is going to be the most valuable trend over the next couple of years," says AI21 Labs CEO Ori Goshen. AI21 Labs is known for developing a large language model and using it to develop products such as Wordtune and Wordtune Read. The company is focused on productivity gains for professionals, changing the way we write and consume written text, and providing the means for other companies to build new applications using LLMs. Prior to AI21, Ori Goshen was the founder and VP of technology for Crowdx which was acquired by Cellwize. He was the founder and VP of R&D for Tawkon and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Cisco. He has a background in cybersecurity, software development, and big data analytics.
S1 E293 · Wed, January 11, 2023
Shane Orlick President of Jasper AI on the Future of Writing and Generative AI - Voicebot Podcast Ep 293
Bret Kinsella wrote this: Jasper AI quietly built one of the top AI-based writing assistants atop OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model (LLM). Then, suddenly its growth and recognition exploded ... in a good way. That led to a $125 million series A funding round that was well-timed ahead of the new interest in the AI-writing assistant space after the introduction of ChatGPT. Shane Orlick is president of Jasper AI and walks through the company's origins, the product, and how customers use these tools today. He even mentions some product features that have not yet been announced (breaking news on the Voicebot Podcast once again) and how users are applying the new Jasper Chat (a ChatGPT-like interface) versus the templates that Jasper has created and refined for specific use cases. For those of you interested in the technical stack behind Jasper and the company's move to build an internal NLU and new AI models that supplement the OpenAI APIs, this may be the only conversation out there with that insight. Shane also discusses the broader market news, such as the impact of ChatGPT, the emergence of text-to-image models, and the rumors about OpenAI's big valuation and potential new investment from Microsoft. We cover a lot of ground around products, user behavior, generative AI, and the broader synthetic media market. Jasper AI rewrote the above to this: Jasper AI is quickly becoming a leader in the AI-writing assistant space. Founded atop OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model (LLM), the company has seen tremendous growth and recognition, so much so that it was able to secure a $125 million series A funding round just before the rise of interest in AI-writing assistants with ChatGPT. Shane Orlick, president of Jasper AI, outlines the company's origins, product features (including some exclusive news!), and how customers are using these tools. In addition, he dives into the technical stack behind Jasper, which includes an internal NLU and new AI models beyond what OpenAI APIs offer. He also shares his thoughts on the broader synthetic media market, including ChatGPT's influence, text-to-image models, OpenAI's potential big valuation, and Microsoft potentially investing. This podcast offers an insightful look at what users can expect from Jasper as well as trends in generative AI and user behavior when it comes to writing and creating content with these tools. ***** Let me know which one you like better!
S1 E292 · Fri, January 06, 2023
Taylan Kamis CEO of DeepZen on Synthetic Voices for Audiobooks and New Applications - Voicebot Podcast Ep 292
Taylan Kamis was inspired by the movie Her to pursue AI technologies that could make synthetic characters and voices more lifelike. After several years with Microsoft, including time on the media and applications team and serving as a CFO for some venture-stage startups, Kamis co-founded DeepZen in 2017. The first problem the DeepZen team sought to address was one of the harder ones in the industry: creating synthetic voices that were high enough quality to be used as narrators for audiobooks. A key element of this problem is the length of the content. The synthetic voice or voices must be pleasing enough to be suitable for long passages and hours of listening at a time. Another important element is the emotive quality of the synthetic voices. DeepZen today provides audiobook production services and enables voice actors to create custom voices and monetize them without having to be in the studio for every project. We talk at length about the audiobook solution and how it works. That is followed by a discussion around new applications that are taking DeepZen into even larger markets.
S1 E291 · Thu, December 29, 2022
Synthetic Media Year in Review 2022 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 291
2022 was the year of synthetic media. The mainstreaming of deepfakes and voice clones, along with the rise of text-to-image AI models, assured synthetic media of a breakout year. Then ChatGPT came along. It changed the conversation entirely and consumed news media and social media cycles for weeks. The GPT-3.5 model was better than expected, and the fine-tuning that delivered ChatGPT showed that large language models were ready to up end a lot of assumptions about what technology in general, and AI in particular, can do. Joining host Bret Kinsella to break down the top synthetic media news of 2022 are Rupal Patel of Veritone, Michal Stanislawek of Utter.one and Hearme.ai, and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. Get ready for an in-depth discussion about everything from digital waste to the meaning of mortality. Along the way, the group discusses OpenAI, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, GPT-3, Google LaMDA, virtual humans, synthetic voices, America's Got Talent, and more.
S1 E290 · Sat, December 24, 2022
Voice AI Year in Review 2022 Enterprise Edition - Voicebot Podcast Ep 290
Enterprise voice AI has been overshadowed for years by the tech giants' activities. That meant the consumer applications often drowned out what was happening in the enterprise. At the same time, most enterprises were moving slowly. That has changed over the past two years. Enterprise adoption of voice and conversational AI solutions is growing steadily and expanding into new use cases. Today we will talk about the contact center, restaurants, automotive, and media sectors. We also go into some detail about large language models and how enterprises are thinking about ChatGPT, Omnichannel, and more. Susan Westwater is the founder of Pragmatic Digital and Strategy Director at Vixen Labs. She is also the author of the book, "Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences." Jason Fields is the chief strategy officer at Voicify, a leading platform for voice experience creation. He was formerly a senior vice president at Rightpoint and an adjunct professor at Emerson College. Braden Ream is the CEO and co-founder of Voiceflow; the leading conversation AI design collaboration platform. Braden also was recently named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Susan, Braden, and Jason are each working on the front lines with enterprises, so you will get some fresh and practical perspectives. Enjoy!
S1 E289 · Thu, December 22, 2022
Voice AI Year in Review 2022 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 289
This is the first of Voicebot's voice AI 2022 year-in-review episodes, and today we focus on consumer solutions. There was no lack of news this year, and industry insiders Peachy-Jean Retizos, Tom Hewitson, and Eric Schwartz join me to break it all down for our sixth annual year-in-review show. Amazon's layoffs that impacted the Alexa and devices groups dominated industry discussions late in the year. However, it was just a few months earlier that a similar move by Google drove industry news cycles. The two tech giants have set the tone for voice AI in consumer solutions since 2014, so the pullbacks were big news. We lead off with these stories and how they are reshaping the voice AI consumer sector. While the moves are generally viewed negatively in the market, we also talk about the positive elements and how they were not exactly unexpected. There is also a discussion about what is getting additional focus in 2023 and where the new paths of growth are emerging. However, the tech giants are not the only game in town. SoundHound became a public company in 2022 and became the first large-scale voice AI pureplay to tap into public financial markets since Nuance. Synthetic speech engines had a notable year in terms of customer growth and acquisitions. And large language models are taking natural language in an entirely new direction, plus we hit on a few other topics. It's been a pretty amazing year with highlights and lowlights, and it was good to get some front-line experts in to hash it all out. Enjoy!
S1 E288 · Thu, December 08, 2022
Jesse Shemen CEO of Papercup on Making the World's Media Available in Any Language - Voicebot Podcast Ep 288
Jesse Shemen is CEO of Papercup, a company he co-founded in 2017. The company transforms audio and video media into multiple languages to broaden its reach. Papercup estimates that 99% of all content is only available in one language. Using AI tools in conjunction with human translators and a synthetic speech engine, Papercup is working with companies such as Bloomberg and Insider to make their content available in the native language of their international audience. Shemen has a finance degree from NYU. He previously was a venture lead at Octopus where he helped launch a wealth technology platform for financial advisors, and a co-founder of Deloitte Ventures UK.
S1 E287 · Wed, November 30, 2022
Chris Parkinson Co-founder and CTO of RealWear on Voice Controlled Applications for Industrial Workers
Chris Parkinson began working on the idea behind RealWear while at Kopin back in 2007. In 2015, he founded WearNext to explore routes to further technical development and commercialization of the productivity tool for connected industrial workers. That ultimately led to co-founding RealWear in 2016. The company presents itself as providing the first hands-free and fully ruggedized head-mounted tablet solution. But it's not quite a tablet. It's a headset for voice interactive hands-free access to data, information, and applications. Earlier in his career, Parkinson was a senior engineer at Alien Technology and a researcher at Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He earned a PhD in computational and theoretical chemistry from the University of Manchester.
S1 E286 · Tue, November 22, 2022
YouTuber Dom Esposito Talks About Creating His Digital Twin
Dom Esposito is a top YouTuber that worked with Hour One to create a digital twin. That's a virtual human clone of himself. In this interview, we show Dom's clone and talk to the real Dom about his motivation behind the project. We also discuss the process for creating the clone and use cases he thinks will be most impactful. Dom Esposito began creating tech review videos on YouTube way back in 2012. He was previously a writer at 9-to-5 Mac and AppAdvice and a Creatives Producer at ClearChannel, now known as iHeart.
S1 E285 · Tue, November 22, 2022
Natalie Monbiot from Hour One on New Virtual Human Use Cases
Natalie Monbiot from Hour One joined me for the recent Synthedia event to present several new use cases in language learning, media, and entertainment that are expanding the market for virtual humans. She shows how synthetic media is being used at Berlitz, Defiance Media, and people creating entertainment on YouTube. Monbiot joined Hour One as head of strategy in 2019. Prior to Hour One, she was an SVP at Publicis, where she worked on new technologies and the Samsung account. She was an SVP at UM Worldwide before that, and earlier in her career worked at IPG Media Lab. Monbiot earned a Masters’s Degree from Oxford. To hear an earlier interview with Natalie and the full Hour One origin story as of summer 2021, check out episode 219.
S1 E284 · Sat, November 19, 2022
Maaike Coppens on Conversation Design Themes in 2022 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 284
Maaike Coppens is the author of the new book Design Conversationnel published in French by Eyrolles with a forthcoming English edition. Maaike and I first met at an event in 2018 in Paris, and that provided a springboard to discuss how the priorities and expectations around conversation design have changed. One important topic we discuss is the rising focus on task completion for voice assistant applications as opposed to likeability and building affective trust. Much of this is driven by changing consumer behaviors and preferences. Coppens is the vice president of design at OpenDialog AI, the developer of the open source conversation management framework. Previously, she was a senior user experience and conversation design consultant for Accor Hotels, Applause, and XAPPmedia. She also worked as a conversation designer at voice-first game maker labworks.io and is an Alexa Champion.
S1 E283 · Mon, November 14, 2022
John Campbell Founder of Rabbit & Pork on Voice SEO and What Use Cases Work Today - Voicebot Podcast Ep 283
John Campbell is the founder and managing director of the voice AI agency Rabbit & Pork, a division of TIPi Group. Previously he was head of performance marketing and SEO at another TIPi agency ROAST. The agency's start was automating the collection of answers from Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant for a variety of questions. That data led to several reports which captured the attention of brands, and from there, Rabbit & Pork began building Alexa skills, Google Actions, and other voice interactive experiences in addition to voice SEO projects. Campbell goes into some detail in our interview about how Rabbit & Pork automated voice search result collection. He also discusses where voice assistants source their answers to common questions, the strategies brands use today to improve their ranking, and approaches that do not work. In addition, we discuss how the Alexa Answers service works today, how it is evolving, and what that indicates about voice search. Beyond search, Campbell goes through the differences in building for Alexa versus Google Assistant and how Google's pullback from the third-party Conversational Action ecosystem has impacted how brands are approaching voice assistants today. We conclude by discussing a variety of industry use cases for voice and chatbot solutions.
S1 E282 · Tue, November 08, 2022
Zohaib Ahmed on Creating Andy Warhol's Voice Clone
Zohaib Ahmed joined us at the Synthedia synthetic media conference in September to discuss Resemble's work re-creating the voice of famed pop artist Andy Warhol. A Netflix documentary was under development that centered around Warhol's diaries. The creators thought it would be more impactful if the viewers could hear the ideas and experiences of Warhol in the artist's own voice. So, they began searching for a synthetic speech provider that could create a voice clone. Ahmed goes through the creation process and some of the challenges faced along the way. Plus there are a couple of nuances that you will find interesting. Zohaib Ahmed is the CEO and co-founder of Resemble AI. He appeared previously on the podcast in episodes 251 and 103. Ahmed previously was a lead software engineer at Magic Leap and Hipmunk and a developer at Blackberry. Voicebot's Eric Schwartz interviews Ahmed in this episode and Bret Kinsella adds commentary at the end about the evolution of synthetic speech.
S1 E281 · Sat, November 05, 2022
Jean-Baptiste Martinoli on How to Make a Film Entirely with AI - Voicebot Podcast Ep 281
Jean-Baptiste Martinoli's current job title is full stack innovator. That seems about right given what he done lately with generative AI tools. One of his latest creations, "Exrtraterrestrial Message," won the award for the best Sci-Fi short film at the Golden Minds film festival. The film was entirely created with generative AI tools. Today's interview was conducted at the Synthedia conference and there is a YouTube version with the full short film on Voicebot's YouTube channel. Martinoli reveals his process, the tools he used, and the fact that it only took about four hours to create. Jean-Baptiste is currently with Nextiva and is the former CTO and co-founder of Exo U., Mioplanent and KanariWorld. Early in his career, Martinoli was a software developer at Lotus, which was later acquired by IBM.
S1 E280 · Thu, October 27, 2022
Muddu Sudhakar CEO of Aisera on Conversational AI Automation
Muddu Sudhakar is the founding CEO of Aisera an automation software company built around conversational AI technologies. He breaks down how the company began with internal helpdesk solutions and moved into other parts of the enterprise, including dev ops, contact center, and broader customer experience solutions. He stresses how all of Aisera solutions are focused on automating business processes. Sudhakar is a former senior VP and GM at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMWare, and Pivotal. He was CEO at Caspida when the company was acquired by Splunk, where he assumed leadership for machine learning, AI, and analytics-based solutions. Sudhakar was also the CEO and founder of the big data startup Cetas, which was acquired by VMWare, and founded Sanera systems which was acquired by Brocade/McData. He began his career as an engineer at IBM and SGI and earned his PhD in computer science from UCLA.
S1 E279 · Fri, October 21, 2022
Voice Summit 2022 Interviews Part 2 with Women in Voice, Skilled Creative, 169 Labs, VUX World, Attention Live, and Veritone
Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. In this Part 2 from the Voice 2022 interviews, we have six more guests, including: - Sara Taheri of Prudential interviewing Kan Simms, VUX World (6:08) - Brandon Kaplan, Skilled Creative (9:35) - Corey Hill, Veritone (14:21) - Maddie Apple, Women in Voice (18:39) - Ian Utile, Attention Live (23:35) - Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner, 169 Labs (33:08) Topics range from the conversation design for the contact center and an integration layer for voice AI solutions to use cases in Europe and a new sporting event product that employs synthetic announcers and in-game data.
S1 E278 · Wed, October 19, 2022
Voice Summit 2022 Interviews with Veritone, Voicify, Speechly, Voice Lunch, Vixen Labs, and Modev
Voice summit is the largest annual gathering of conversational AI professionals. Voicebot took the opportunity to interview several industry leaders to get their perspectives on the conversational AI market today and where it is headed. Guests include: - Michal Stanislawek, Utter One / VoiceLunch (6:25) - Rupal Patel, Veritone (12:57) - Jeff McMahon, Voicify (18:46) - Collin Borns, Speechly (25:44) - Susan Westwater, Vixen Labs (33:08) - Pete Erickson, Modev / Voice Summit (36:58) Topics range from the use cases driving the most conversational AI demand today and best practices for voice strategy to whether there is a voice winter underway.
S1 E277 · Sun, October 16, 2022
Anne Spalter on Art and AI Text-to-Image Generators - Voicebot Podcast Ep 277
Anne Spalter is a world-renowned artist with artwork in museums, galleries, and collections throughout the globe. She is known for having created the curriculum for the first university-level digital art programs. That work was for the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University in the 1990s. More recently, Anne has emerged as a pioneer in creating fine art using AI-based text-to-image generators. She launched a collection of 501 pieces earlier this year called AI spaceships, which she made into NFTs, and they sold out in an hour. That collaboration was with Night Cafe. Since then, she has launched a new art show which includes a variety of artwork using OpenAI's DALL-E and Midjourney, which are other prominent text-to-image generators. Anne offers a perspective on the rise of synthetic media and how it is being received and used in the art world. She also shares some pro tips on how to use the new tools. This interview was conducted at the Synthedia synthetic media conference hosted by Voicebot in September.
S1 E276 · Thu, October 13, 2022
Greg Cross from Soul Machines on Autonomous Digital Humans
Greg Cross, CEO and co-founder of Soul Machines recently took to the stage at the Synthedia synthetic media conference with a discussion titled: "The Robots are Coming and We Need Them Now." His thesis that we are already living in the future because the events over the past two years have accelerated societal change is backed up by mounting data. One area that is greatly impacted is the accelerated need for automation and often it requires a digital brain to determine what types of digital services and interactions will best serve a custom. Enter autonomous digital people. Greg's talk can also be viewed in Voicebot's YouTube channel where you will see as well as hear the digital humans. However, the presentation and the conversation with host Bret Kinsella are also well-suited to listening. If you want to know what 2025 looks like, you can see it all around you right now.
S1 E275 · Fri, October 07, 2022
Shiv Rao CEO of Abridge on Voice Assistants for Patients and Doctors
Shiv Rao is a cardiologist that co-founded Abridge in 2018 to help patients and doctors get better results from their encounters. Abridge listens to the doctor-patient conversations, provides a transcription, and categorizes specific details such as medications, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, and the care plan. Patients can access the conversation details through a mobile app that also highlights key words such as medications and procedures and provides click-through definitions. For doctors, the transcripts are packaged as physician notes which they can review and then automatically upload into the electronic medical record (EMR). Other solutions in the space focus on helping physicians get the right data into the right fields in the EMR. Abridge is focused on the rich data in the conversation beyond the required information. Rao was formerly a senior executive at UPMC Enterprises and serves as faculty and a working cardiologist at the Heart and Vascular Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He earned his MD from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
S1 E274 · Tue, September 27, 2022
Dylan Fox CEO of Assembly AI on AI Models as a Service - Voicebot Podcast Ep 274
Dylan Fox founded Assembly AI in 2017 and was part of the Y Combinator Accelerator that year. Prior to founding the company, Dylan was a senior software engineer at Cisco. Assembly AI fashions itself as an expert in AI model training and provisioning. It researches the new AI models, trains and then deploys them and makes the models available as a service to other companies. The idea is to give developers easy access to high performing AI models without having to set up a hosting environment or train them.
S1 E273 · Thu, September 22, 2022
Rabi Gupta CEO of the Gift Giving Evabot - Voicebot Podcast Ep 273
Rabi Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot, the gifting assistant, in 2017. The company went through the Boost VC accelerator, where he was also an entrepreneur in residence, in 2017. Rabi was also CEO and co-founder of iCouchapp, which was acquired by Vidooly in 2016. Our discussion today is about a practical application for a virtual assistant. The corporate gift-giving market is $250 billion annually. Gupta and his co-founder created Evabot to make that process easy, efficient, and better matched with what the gift recipients actually like.
S1 E272 · Thu, September 15, 2022
Nick Schwab CEO of Sleep Jar on Building a Profitable Voice App Business - Voicebot Podcast Ep 272
Nick Schwab is making his record fifth appearance on the Voicebot Podcast. You can hear him previously on episodes 2, 22, 58, and 96. In fact, I recommend you check out episodes 2 and 58 to learn more about his background and a sense of how his business has evolved from deal of the day to stock ticker to sleep sounds empire. The more notable aspects of Nick's appearance today are that he has not been on the podcast in three years, and Sleep Jar is one of the most successful Alexa skills and voice-first user experiences developed by a third party. We get into monetization, growth, working with the platforms, and sometimes no longer working with them. Nick Schwab began building Alexa skills in 2016 and founded Sleep Jar in 2017. Prior to committing to Sleep Jar full time in 2021, he was a senior software engineer at Livio, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. He is also an Alexa champion.
S1 E271 · Sat, September 10, 2022
Val Jones CTO of Storyfile on Conversational Video - Voicebot Podcast Ep 271
Val Jones joined Storyfile as CTO in January 2021 after a leadership role at Raxium and 16 years at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute has been at the forefront of synthetic media research and innovation for more than a decade. Storyfile has products that might be thought of by some as virtual humans or digital twins, but the company characterizes its solution as conversational video. After capturing robust video recordings of people discussing a particular set of topics, Storyfile creates an interactive lifelike avatar that you can talk to through a website, app, or kiosk. The most famous Storyfile user is the actor William Shatner though the project first gained widespread attention by capturing the experiences of holocaust survivors. Today, the technology is used for everything from entertainment, training, and answering product questions to preserving the memories of loved ones before they pass away. Jones discusses the use cases, technology evolution, and trade-offs in this rapidly growing market segment. Jones earned PhD, master's, and undergraduate degrees in computer science from USC.
S1 E270 · Fri, September 02, 2022
Mark Fosdike CEO of Datch on Custom Voice Assistants for Manufacturers
Mark Fosdike co-founded Datch in 2017 after spending several years as an aircraft systems design engineer at CAV aerospace. His co-founder also had experience in industrial manufacturing at Siemens and Transpower. Both are engineers, so they had a keen sense of the challenges of getting access to information and entering data while working with heavy equipment in industrial manufacturing. Mark breaks down the key use cases, the tech stack for Datch, training the voice assistant, and much more in today's conversation. Custom voice assistants can do more than just play music and tell you the weather.
S1 E269 · Sat, August 27, 2022
Paul Cutsinger from Nvidia on Simulation, Metaverse, and Conversational AI
Paul Cutsinger is the director of Nvidia Omniverse Exchange, a platform for building simulation and metaverse environments. He discusses how companies are using Omniverse to simulate operations to improve efficiency and reduce operational risk, in addition to capabilities around metaverse and virtual human development. Prior to Nvidia, Paul ran developer education and evangelism programs for Amazon Alexa, worked on the Amazon App store, in gaming at Disney, and with browsers at Microsoft. He will be a featured speaker at Synthedia, the synthetic media conference, in September 2022. Synthedia is online and free to attend. Register here: https://bit.ly/synthedia-rising
S1 E268 · Sun, August 21, 2022
Say It Now CEO Charles Cadbury on Actionable Voice Ads - Voicebot Podcast Ep 268
Charles Cadbury breaks down how voice assistants can be used to drive awareness and sales for consumer brands. Say It Now was founded in 2018 and won the European Alexa Cup in 2019. The company made headlines during the COVID-19 pandemic when it rolled out a solution to help raise funds for charities through smart speakers. Learnings from that initiative led to the development of Say It Now's Actionable Audio Ads which drive user interaction with branded Alexa skills. Cadbury breaks down the effectiveness of integrating consumer touchpoints through smart speakers, radio, and marketing campaigns to drive conversions. He also discusses recent neurological research on how consumers respond to these campaigns.
S1 E267 · Thu, August 11, 2022
John Goscha CEO of Native Voice on Direct Access to Branded Voice Assistants - Voicebot Podcast Ep 267
John Goscha founded Native Voice in 2020 to enable any custom voice assistant to become a first-class citizen on any device. That means it is not behind another voice assistant or buried in an app. It can instead be activated directly from any device by its branded wake word. We talk about why this is important to brands looking to deepen their relationship with customers and make access to their services more convenient. And, we talk about the Native Voice tech stack and what it takes to enable multiple, simultaneously available voice assistants. There is also a discussion about Native Voice's big announcement with Amazon and Skull Candy at Alexa Live.
S1 E266 · Sat, August 06, 2022
Evan MacMillan CEO of Gridspace on Conversational AI Analysis - Voicebot Podcast Ep 266
Evan MacMillan started Gridspace 10 years ago to tackle a tough problem faced by contact centers: analyzing their conversational data. It's an application that stands apart from most conversational AI solutions with its focus on conversational intelligence as opposed to self-service. Before co-founding Gridspace, MacMillan was a co-founder at Zappedy, which was acquired by Groupon during the heyday of online deals communities. He earned a degree in product design from Stanford.
S1 E265 · Tue, July 26, 2022
Alexa Live 2022 Recap Show with Firstenburg, Tucker, and Schwartz - Voicebot Podcast Ep 265
The Amazon Alexa Live event for 2022 introduced a couple of dozen new features for developers, new revenue-sharing agreements, and is ushering in a new era of simultaneous voice assistants. The Two Voice Devs, Allen Firstenberg (Google Assistant GDE) and Mark Tucker (Alexa Champion), along with Voicebot's Eric Schwartz and Bret Kinsella break down the announcements and sort through the type of impacts we can expect.
S1 E264 · Sat, July 23, 2022
David Liu of Sonde Health on Vocal Biomarkers - Voicebot Podcast Ep 264
David Liu is CEO of Sonde Health, a company using vocal biomarkers to assess patient health, wellness, and fitness. The company is white labeling its solution for app developers with initial products for respiratory and mental health problems. In the interview, Liu discusses the product, technology, and key markets serving as the first adopters. These include healthcare providers and payers along with one industry I wasn't expecting. Liu has been CEO of Sonde Health since 2019. He previously was chief operating officer at Quartet Health and education technology company Knewton and was a senior vice president at AOL. He earned an engineering degree from Purdue and an MBA from Columbia.
S1 E263 · Sun, July 17, 2022
Timo Kunz on Synthetic Media and Audio as a Service - Voicebot Podcast Ep 263
Timo Kunz has a PhD in operations research and spent more than a decade as a data scientist and analyst before founding Aflorithmic Labs in 2019. The company's first product, API.audio, is a developer toolset for quickly adding synthetic voice audio combined with other features such as music and effects. It is promoted as the first audio-as-a-service solution for developers that enables control of key audio characteristics without the need for separate post-production audio engineering. Key use cases are in advertising, marketing, and media.
S1 E262 · Fri, July 08, 2022
Kim Conti and Chen Zhang of RAIN on Custom Voice Assistants - Voicebot Podcast Ep 262
Voice assistants are broadly adopted by consumers and for several consumer facing activities such as customer support. Kim Conti, vice president of product, and Chen Zhang, chief technology officer of RAIN Agency share their experience building custom voice assistants for enterprise processes and products in general and more recently for deskless workers. They also share the details behind their beta version custom voice assistant for auto mechanics which is expected to be generally available later this year. Conti has held product leadership roles at Travelers while Zhang was on the NLP software engineering team at Apple for the Chinese version of Siri and was later engineering director of AI speech and NLP for Midea.
S1 E261 · Sat, July 02, 2022
The Top Voice AI Stories of the First Have of 2022 with Special Guests - Voicebot Podcast 261
Topics today include Amazon's new Astro Robot in operation, the rise of voice AI in the contact center, the increase in acquisitions and large funding rounds, custom branded assistants, Google's sunsetting of conversational actions, and a whole lot more. Speakers breaking down the news of 2022 so far: - Sarah Andrew Wilson - former CCO at Matchbox.io before Volley acquisition - Paul Sweeney - chief product officer at Webio - Eric Schwartz - head writer at Voicebot.ai - Bret Kinsella - founder of Voicebot.ai
S1 E260 · Wed, June 29, 2022
Braden Ream CEO of Voiceflow on the Shifting Voice AI Market - Voicebot Podcast Ep 260
Braden Ream is CEO of Voiceflow, a leading conversational AI design collaboration solution combined with a no-code platform for deploying voice apps. Voiceflow was founded in 2019 and has tens of thousands of users and more than 400 companies. Today we discuss Voiceflow's evolution into enterprise solutions, its expanding feature base, and the top customer use cases. We also delve into how the conversational AI industry has changed including the shift to custom branded voice assistants as well as the impact of the recent Google Assistant news that it is shutting down Conversational Action developer support.
S1 E259 · Fri, June 24, 2022
James Poulter CEO of Vixen Labs on Voice Assistant Consumer Data - Voicebot Podcast Ep 259
James Poulter and Vixen Labs along with the Open Voice Network and Veritone surveyed 6000 consumers in the U.S., UK, and Germany about their perception and use of voice assistants and smart speakers. We break down the findings and discuss the implications for the industry as a whole. Trends, data, industry news -- all the things you like. Poulter co-founded Vixen Labs in 2018. He previously was head of emerging platforms and partnerships for LEGO Group where he did some voice AI work and early in his career was an associate director at Edelman.
S1 E258 · Sun, June 19, 2022
Google Assistant Retreats on Conversational Actions with Firstenberg, Tucker, and Schwartz - Voicebot Podcast Ep 258
Google announced it will be sunsetting support for third-party conversational actions–the voice apps that work with Google Assistant–in June 2023. It decided there was no point in maintaining a separate app store just for voice and it is encouraging conversational action developers to port their experiences over to Android apps. This special edition of the Voicebot Podcast showcases Allen Firstenberg and Mark Tucker, both active developers of conversational actions and other voice app experiences. Firstenberg is a GDE for Google Assistant and Mark Tucker is an Alexa Champion so both have some notable accomplishments in the space. They are both also well known in the voice developer community in part from their Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube show. We discuss the impact on the Google Assistant and Alexa ecosystems and how this will shape the future of voice assistants.
S1 E257 · Mon, May 30, 2022
Brandon Kaplan CEO of Skilled Creative and Co-Founder of Journey - Voicebot Podcast Ep 257
Brandon Kaplan founded Skilled Creative in 2017 and continues to serve as CEO. The agency is well known for delivering voice AI strategy, solutions, and analytics for top media and consumer good companies ranging from Meredith and HBO to Pottermore and Pepsico. In 2022, Skilled Creative was merged with two other agencies to form Journey to create a new "experience" agency with expertise in immersive technologies such as AI, Metaverse, and physical world activations. Kaplan also serves as Chief Innovation Officer of the combined company while directly managing the voice AI business. We discuss the past, present, and future of voice AI, how enterprises are managing the shift to conversation, and the value of the Journey agency model.
S1 E256 · Wed, May 25, 2022
John Kelvie CEO of Bespoken on Improving Voice Assistant Performance - Voicebot Podcast Ep 256
John Kelvie is CEO of Bespoken, a leader in automated testing software for voice assistants. We discuss his company's journey from 2016 to 2022. And, we cover the voice assistant market evolution from Alexa and Google Assistant to custom voice assistants, customer support bots, and other novel applications. That discussion also takes us from predominantly consumer applications of voice assistants to the enterprise. You might also enjoy going back to episode 6 or 55 where John shared the perspective of the early days of Bespoken.
S1 E255 · Fri, May 13, 2022
Keyvan Mohajer CEO of SoundHound on 18 Years to a Billion Dollar Voice Assistant - Voicebot Podcast Ep 255
Keyvan Mohajer is CEO of SoundHound (SOUN), the creator of both a beloved music recognition mobile app and one of the most successful custom voice assistant development platforms. The company recently went public and carries a market capitalization of over $1 billion. We talk about the volatility of the stock but the real focus is drilling down into the company's business model, the use cases, and what the market wants in voice assistant technology today. Mohajer founded SoundHound in 2004 while studying for his PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford. The company's voice assistant technology is used in solutions for companies ranging from Mercedes and Hyundai to Snap, Netflix, and White Castle. Its music recognition mobile app has been downloaded more than 300 million times.
S1 E254 · Fri, May 06, 2022
Dana Young CEO of AIPEX on Voice Assistants for Hospitality - Voicebot Podcast Ep 254
Dana Young founded AIPEX in 2017 to solve a problem he faced as an independent vacation rental property host. Voice assistants could provide his guests with a better experience and save him the challenge of answering a lot of redundant questions. He started by building Alexa skills and Google Actions. AIPEX now has a shared service instance of Alexa for Hospitality which makes the solution scalable and easy to use for other property owners, hotels, and assisted living communities. Dana shares in detail his journey building the first self-service solution for vacation rental and hotel owners, the key use cases, and evolution of the company.
S1 E253 · Thu, April 28, 2022
Ilya Gelfenbeyn and Kylan Gibbs of Inworld on Voice AI in the Metaverse - Voicebot Podcast Ep 253
Ilya Gelfenbeyn is CEO and Kylan Gibbs is chief product officer of Inworld. The company has a novel voice AI service that gives brains to in-game and metaverse characters and enables them to have personalities, backstories, knowledge, and the ability to converse. It's an impressive combination of conversational AI technologies for configuring characters and operating them in virtual worlds. There is a lot of talk about metaverses and how conversational AI may play a role. Inworld has the most interesting angle I have seen to date on this topic. Gelfenbeyn was CEO and co-founder of API.ai which was acquired by Google in 2016 and became Dialogflow. Gibbs is the former product manager for conversational AI products at DeepMind.
S1 E252 · Fri, April 22, 2022
Raj Koneru CEO of Kore.ai on Conversational AI Today - Voicebot Podcast Ep 252
Raj Koneru is the CEO of Kore.ai. He founded the company in 2014 to tackle the need for automated interactions in messaging. That led to conversational AI services for messaging platforms ranging from white label solutions for enterprises to integration with WhatsApp Apple Messages for Business and other platforms. The company also expanded into voice services and last fall raised $70 million in a Series C funding round. Today, we discuss the evolution of chatbots and voice assistants, what enterprises are focused on automating now, and the role conversational AI will play in the metaverse.
S1 E251 · Thu, April 14, 2022
Zohaib Ahmed CEO of Resemble AI on Synthetic Voices - Voicebot Podcast Ep 251
Zohaib Zohaib Ahmed co-founded Resemble AI in 2019 after working as a software engineer at high profile and innovative companies including Magic Leap, Hipmunk, and Blackberry. Zohaib's work at Magic Leap introduced him to novel UI interactions and his work analyzing user data led to deep learning models. From there he began to explore synthetic media and speech synthesis and Resemble was born. Resemble AI graduated from the Betaworks Synthetic Camp accelerator back in 2019 and was recently in the news for creating Andy Warhol's voice for a new Netflix documentary.
S1 E250 · Thu, April 07, 2022
Alex Serduik CEO of Voice Cloning Startup Respeecher - Voicebot Podcast Ep 250
Respeecher is one of the leading voice cloning solutions on the market today. It is also headquartered in Ukraine. In my recent update with Alex Serdiuk, I learned that despite the war in Ukraine, Respeecher was, in fact, still operating and fulfilling customer contracts. So, we agreed to catch up on Respeecher's current business and also let everyone know the company is still operating despite the war. You are really going to like this discussion. We talk about voice cloning for media, how it's different from speech to text, deepfakes, ethical considerations, and a whole lot more. Alex Serdiuk is CEO of Respeecher. The company has worked on several high-profile movie and TV projects including The Mandalorian where they recreated the voice of a young Luke Skywalker in an emmy-award winning piece of work.
S1 E249 · Thu, March 31, 2022
Chris Maeda CTO of Botco on Bots and eCommerce - Voicebot Podcast Ep 249
Chris Maeda has an undergraduate degree in computer science from MIT and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon. He was hacking LISP machines in the late 1980s in his first AI job and then moved onto the famed Xerox PARC. After that, he wound up doing a lot of customer relationship management software startups including co-founding Rubric Software which merged with Broadbase in 2000 and later was absorbed into Kana where he was EVP and CTO. He also became CEO of a company that eventually acquired the marketing software solutions from Kana and added the title of CEO of MailMonitor an email marketing software company. In 2017, Mida co-founded Botco which is focused on AI-powered natural language marketing and eCommerce automation for enterprises.
S1 E248 · Fri, March 25, 2022
Chris Ume Co Founder of Metaphysic.ai and Creator of Deep Tom Cruise - Voicebot Podcast Ep 248
Chris Ume is a visual effects expert with many years experience in entertainment and corporate projects. In 2020, he began experimenting with deep fake technology, sourcing AI models from obscure Russian websites, and experimenting with new techniques. That led to a collaboration with an American actor known for Tom Cruise parody videos and Deep Tom Cruise was born. Following, the viral success of those deep fake videos and others, Ume co-founded Metaphysic.ai in 2021 and the company recently closed a $7.5 million funding round.
S1 E247 · Sun, March 13, 2022
Max Child CEO of Volley on Voice Games and the Matchbox Acquisition - Ep 247
Max Child makes his third appearance on the Voicebot Podcast to discuss the evolution of the voice games market as well as Volley's recent acquisition of Matchbox.io. Matchbox is the creator of the popular Alexa game Question of the Day and Max outlines Volley's strategy behind the purchase and how it fits into the company's portfolio. We talk extensively about voice app discovery and monetization and what is working today. Max is a graduate of Harvard and was an analyst at Boston Consulting Group before setting out to create games.
S1 E246 · Sat, March 05, 2022
Kundan Kumar Head of AI at Descript - Voicebot Podcast Ep 246
Kunden Kumar is head of AI at Descript. He was a co-founder of the innovative synthetic speech company Lyrebird which Descript acquired in 2019. He has a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Montreal and a computer science degree from IIT. Kumar was also a researcher at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithems (MILA) where he was mentored by Joshua Bengio.
S1 E245 · Mon, February 28, 2022
Alex Quinn CEO of Disruptel Is Creating a Voice Assistant with Eyes - Voicebot Podcast Ep 245
Alex Quinn founded Disruptel while still in high school and the team just landed a big deal with the world's fourth-largest television maker. He says TCL was won over by the opportunity to implement the first voice assistant with eyes. Disruptel's Deep Frame product knows what is on the screen and can identify it in real time. It has an AI-vision system and an extensive facial recognition database along with a knowledge graph that gathers text-based data. A natural language voice assistant enables any number of questions about the content on screen and can be coupled with targeted advertising and voice commerce referrals. It's an interesting application that extends the boundaries of voice assistant expectations.
S1 E244 · Fri, February 25, 2022
Voice AI Predictions 2022 with 6 More Industry Leaders – Voicebot Podcast Ep 244
Six industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. This is part two of our two-part series. Commentary from: Joao Alqueres, Iara Benjamin Brown, ConverseNow Pete Erickson, Modev Hannes Heikenheimo, Speechly Mike Zagorsek, SoundHound Dylan Zwick, Pulse Labs
S1 E243 · Fri, February 11, 2022
Voice AI 2022 Predictions and Barriers Part 1 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 243
Seven industry leaders join with Voicebot's Bret Kinsella to discuss 2022 voice AI predictions, barriers to adoption, and top developments in the industry over the past two years. Commentary from: Audrey Arbeeny Chithra Durgam Jason Fields Maarten Lens-FitzGerald Todd Mozer Patricia Scanlon Amy Stapleton
S1 E242 · Mon, January 24, 2022
Healthcare Voice Assistant Trends and Data Deep Dive
Today we break down key findings from the Healthcare Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2022. The data includes 2019 - 2021 trends and analysis including market size, user adoption demographics, what patients want, and much more. This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and healthcare industries. There is a companion to this episode released on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show.
S1 E241 · Wed, January 19, 2022
Voice Shopping Data Deep Dive
Today's episode breaks down some of the key findings from the Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report for 2021. Data presented goes back to 2018 and shows a rising trend in adoption. Learn about total users, total consumer interest, product categories, average voice shopping order size, demographic data around users and much more. This episode features Bret Kinsella breaking down the data and discussing the implications for the voice and retail industries. There is a companion to this episode release on YouTube where you can view the charts referenced in the show.
S1 E240 · Fri, January 07, 2022
Voice Year in Review 2021 The Consumer Edition
This is the U.S. edition and the Consumer edition of our two-part year in review episodes. We discuss the industry globally from a U.S. perspective with three guests that include: Chithra Durgam - Founder Blue Check Skill which helps bring celebrities and brands onto Amazon Alexa and also is a practicing dentist. Todd Mozer - CEO of Sensory, a company he founded in 1994. The company has been adding voice AI features to consumer products for over 25 years and can be found in billions of devices. Eric Schwartz - Head Writer Voicebot.ai and the author of many of the stories we discuss today.
S1 E239 · Mon, December 27, 2021
Voice Year in Review 2021 The Enterprise Edition
This week we discuss voice year in review for 2021. All of the guests in this episode are based in Europe but operate globally so you will get both perspectives. Also, the conversation is heavily skewed toward enterprise voice applications because that drove so much of the important news in 2021. We start with an in-depth discussion of acquisitions and funding which were bigger in 2021 than in any previous year. Guests include: - Otto Soderlund is CEO and co-founder of Speechly which is pioneering a new full-duplex and super-fast voice interface for the web and mobile. - Dominik Meissner is a co-founder of 169 labs. The company has worked with Sony, Ikea, Lotto, Mercedes Benz, MINI, and Diageo. - Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald is the creator of Open Voice, one of the most popular newsletters in the industry, and founder of the Project Zilver consortium which seeks to make the lives of elder adults better through the use of voice assistants.
S1 E238 · Thu, December 23, 2021
Jon Stine Founder and Executive Director of the Open Voice Network
Jon Stine is the Executive Director and founder of the Open Voice Network. Prior to founding OVN, Stine was global director of retail sales at Intel and a director of North American retail at Cisco. He has an MS in telecommunications from the University of Oregon. Today we talk about voice assistant interoperability, standards, and keeping AI systems open and consumer-friendly.
S1 E237 · Wed, December 15, 2021
Raghu Ravinutala CEO of Yellow AI
Raghu Ravinutala co-founded Yellow.ai in 2015 to solve a problem he personally had encountered, poor customer support experiences. A former IC chip designer, Raghu was drawn by the idea that conversational AI combined with back-end systems integration could fully automate a wide array of customer problems nearly instantly without needing to wait on hold for support reps. In 2016, the company was accepted to the Microsoft Accelerator and the company counts over 750 enterprise clients globally. Prior to Yellow, Raghu was a Senior Manager for integrated circuit design engineering at Broadcom, VP of product management at Teleradtech, and a senior IC designer at Texas Instruments. In today's interview, Raghu talks about the origin of Yellow.ai, how the company grew rapidly by supporting WhatsApp integration, how messaging is so much different as a channel than a chatbot on a website, what the enterprise really needs in conversational AI, the myth around the superiority of human customer service agents, what are Moments of Trust in the customer relationship, and the need for Dynamic AI Agents that support every customer channel. It's a wide-ranging discussion that illuminates several news ideas in conversational AI.
S1 E236 · Thu, December 02, 2021
Vinay Shukla CEO of ConverseNow on Voice Assistants for Restaurants
Vinay Shukla is CEO and co-founder of ConverseNow and the former founder and President of Endeavour Software. Endeavour was acquired by Genpact in 2016 where Vinay served as vice president of digital for two years before founding ConverseNow. Today we discuss ConverseNow's original focus, its pivot to serving restaurants in late 2019, and how the pandemic has transformed that industry. We also discuss how the company went from serving zero to over 1000 restaurants in less than two years. Earlier in his career, Vinay was an assistant vice president of technology at Barclays and a solutions architect at UBS.
S1 E235 · Sun, November 21, 2021
Roger Kibbe on the Evolution of Samsung Bixby and Voice Assistants
Roger Kibbe is Senior Developer Evangelist at Viv Labs which is the home of Bixby in Samsung Research Americas. Today, we discuss the evolution of Bixby and voice assistants over the past five years. In particular, we break down the new Bixby Home features and the rise of AI in smart home features. We also go into depth around the importance of command and control voice interactions. Prior to Samsung, Kibbe founded Voice Craft, a voice app development firm which was preceded by 12 year at Gap Inc. where he oversaw customer experience and logistics technology strategy. He also worked at Accenture early in his career.
S1 E234 · Mon, November 08, 2021
Talkatoo CEO Shawn Wilkie on Voice for Veterinarians
Shawn Wilkie is CEO of Talkatoo. A cross-platform speech-to-text solution for Veterinarians. It streamlines patient data input and works across multiple platforms. He founded the company in 2019 with the first product arriving late in the year. The onset of the pandemic led to rapid acceleration of vet adoption which continues through today and helped to secure a new funding round in September. Wilkie is also the host of the Veterinary Innovation Podcast which began in 2019. Prior to Talkatoo he was CEO of Robotnik and founder of Sheepdog.
S1 E233 · Thu, November 04, 2021
Conversational AI at Pepsico with Elena Parlatore
Elena Parlatore is the senior director of global digital consumer experience at Pepsico. Her role in the consumer insights group focuses on all of the ways consumers interact with Pepsico products and channels. A big part of that work is focused on consumer interaction with conversational AI technologies through Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, website chatbots, and the call center. Today, we discuss the objectives, technologies, channels, and the results of Pepsico's many conversational AI initiatives. It is a rare look inside the way that large consumer goods enterprises approach conversational AI.
S1 E232 · Sun, October 31, 2021
Rob Carpenter CEO of Valyant on Voice in the Drive Through
Rob Carpenter founded Valyant in 2017 with a specific focus on developing a voice assistant drive-through solution for fast food restaurants. While Carpenter insists Valyant is building a platform that can support other use cases in the future, he also is clearly focused on mastering the drive-through use case and goes into depth about the hardware, software, and workflow Valyant has built. We discuss the key technical and business process challenges that Valyant had to overcome and what their customers set as key solution requirements. In addition, Carpenter breaks down Valyant's tech stack and the competitive environment.
S1 E231 · Thu, October 21, 2021
Edward Saatchi Founder of Fable Studio on Creating Virtual Beings
Edward Saatchi is the founder of Fable Studio which is bringing AR and VR characters to life for the metaverse. Fable is creating both characters and a world where you can interact with them, but more interestingly, where these virtual beings can learn and evolve. Prior to Fable Studio, Saatchi was the founder of the Emmy Award-winning VR movie studio Oculus Story Studio. Earlier, he was the founder of NationalField which provided social media technology for the Obama for America organization and presidential campaigns. Saatchi has degrees from Sorbonne and Oxford.
S1 E230 · Mon, October 11, 2021
Co-founder of Soul Machines on Virtual Humans and Interactive Animation - Voicebot Podcast Ep 230
Greg Cross is co-founder and chief business officer of Soul Machines, a leader in the creation of virtual humans (aka digital people). We discuss the origin story that goes back to 2012 as a research organization set up at the University of Aukland through the founding of Soul Machines in 2016, how 2020 accelerated the business, and what is happening today. In addition, we delve into the world of digital employees, the integration of voice AI solutions, touch on the metaverse, and review specific use cases by industry. Greg is the former chairman of SLI Systems, CEO and co-founder of PowerbyProxi, a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and former managing director of Microsoft New Zealand.
S1 E229 · Fri, October 01, 2021
Amazon Product Launch Event 2021 Hot Takes from Voice Industry Leaders
Amazon just announced a custom voice assistant deal with Disney and a bushel full of new products including a smart display you hang on the wall and a home robot. After the event concluded, a few of us gathered in the Voicebot Discord Community to discuss what we saw, our initial reactions, and what it is likely to mean for the industry. Plus, we learn which of the new products the podcast guests are planning to buy and why. Joining me in the conversation are Sarah Andrew Wilson of Matchbox.io, Allen Firstenberg from Objective Consulting, Tom Hewitson from Labworks.io, Dave Kemp of Oaktree Products. and Andrew Herndon from Voicebot.ai.
S1 E228 · Tue, September 28, 2021
Hannes Heikinheimo Co-founder and CTO at Speechly
Hannes Heikinheimo co-founded Speechly in 2016 with the vision to create a low-latency, real-time streaming speech recognition API. Today, Speechly offers an API that it says is the fastest voice UI for the web and other platforms. Prior to Speechly, he was a data science partner at Reaktor, a language engineer working on Siri for Apple, the analytics lead at game-maker Rovio, a Senior Data Scientist at Nokia, and a machine learning researcher at Helsinki University of Technology where he earned his PhD.
S1 E227 · Mon, September 20, 2021
Daniel Kornev Chief Product Officer at DeepPavlov
Daniel Kornev is chief product officer for DeepPavlov.ai which is the developer behind the open source framework for building voice assistants. The company has raised over $9 million in funding and has over 50,000 downloads and 5000 Stars on GitHub. In addition, Kornev served as an advisor to the Alexa Prize team from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Before DeepPavlov, Daniel Kornev spent two years working as a consultant and interim executive with a variety of conversational AI startups. He also was a Senior Product Manager at Yandex where he worked on some of the core feature sets for the Alice voice assistant. Earlier, he was a technical program manager at Google and a program manager and dev evangelist at Microsoft. Daniel Kornev has an M.S. in computer science and has done extensive research in human-computer interaction.
S1 E226 · Mon, September 13, 2021
Andy Mauro CEO of Automat on Conversational Commerce
Andy Mauro is the CEO of Automat which he co-founded in 2016. Its solution creates personalized shopping experiences for eCommerce that learns the needs of customers through a conversational interaction that then returns better product recommendations and higher conversion rates. The AI part of the solution starts by ingesting a product catalog and labeling the content to help drive better understanding about how the products fulfill needs beyond categories and specifications. It complements this with a conversational chat interface that can interact with shoppers and surface the appropriate product catalog item based on their needs. Notably, prior to founding Automat, Andy was senior director of Nuance's Innovations Group and the product manager for Nuance's custom voice assistant Nina, launched in 2014. He spent over 15 years at Nuance and witnessed its key growth era firsthand. Andy dissects the custom voice assistant market's origins and status today which is a nice launching point for discussing Automat and the company's strategy around e-commerce.
S1 E225 · Mon, September 06, 2021
Professor Jan Sedivy on Winning the Alexa Prize SocialBot Challenge and 40 Years in Voice Tech
Jan Sedivy is a Researcher at the Institute of Cybernetics and Robotics at the Czech Technical University (CTU) and a member of the faculty of electrical engineering. This is also his alma mater where he earned a PhD in 1983. Jan served as the faculty leader for Team Alquist from CTU which was the 2021 winner of the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge. The SoicalBot Grand Challenge is for university teams to develop conversational bots that can hold a conversation with a user for an average of 20 minutes and receive positive reviews. About a dozen teams are selected each year to compete. The team from the Czech Technical University has been a finalist in all four competitions for the SocialBot Grand Challenge, coming in second twice and third once. This year's competition yielded its first win for the top prize and the $500,000 reward. We discuss the Alexa Prize process, expectations, tools, and technical approaches in today's discussion including how the university teams use the funding that Amazon offers to the semi-finalists. I don't believe there has ever been a conversation revealing this much about the inner workings of the Alexa Prize competition. In addition, we go well beyond this topic with Jan because of his rich history in the industry. After several years as an assistant professor focused on digital signal processing, he moved to IBM where he worked on speech recognition and language interaction for over 15 years. From there, he spent time at Google before returning to academia. He is also an advisor to several companies working on a range of solutions including virtual humans and mental health chatbots.
S1 E224 · Mon, August 30, 2021
Trends for Voice Assistant Use in the Car 2021
Voice assistants are used across many devices and in many different contexts. The car is what we characterize as among the big 3 along with smart speakers and smartphones. These are the surfaces that have the largest voice assistant user bases both overall and in terms of active users. The recently published In-Car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report for 2021 is the jumping-off point for today's discussion between Bret Kinsella and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai. This report includes consumer adoption data from the U.S., UK, and Germany and includes consumer trend data going back to 2019. There is also a lot of analysis dedicated to the capabilities and momentum of the key vendors providing voice assistant technology to automakers. In addition, we discuss trends in the news around automaker voice assistant related announcements. Today's discussion is a quick way to get oriented around that state of voice assistant adoption and capabilities in the car. For those of you looking for more details, go to research.voicebot.ai.
S1 E223 · Mon, August 23, 2021
Ryan Star CEO of Stationhead on Social Audio and the Evolution of Media Creators
Ryan Star is CEO and founder of Stationhead, a social audio app that enables anyone to start their own social, global radio program. He is a recording artist that got his big break playing at CBGBs in New York and then opening for Bon Jovi when he was still in high school. Today, he has more than 40 million plays on Spotify and around 200,000 monthly listeners. Ryan has worked in entertainment long enough to understand where there are gaps for creators, particularly those that haven't hit it big yet. That led him to create Stationhead in 2017. Some Stationhead show DJs have had over 200,000 concurrent listeners on their shows and successful monetization. It is a different angle on social audio and an innovative model.
S1 E222 · Tue, August 17, 2021
Ryan Steelberg President of Vertione on AI Applications that Mine Unstructured Data
Ryan Steelberg is President of Veritone. He co-founded the company with his brother in 2014 and it became publicly traded on NASDAQ in 2017. Ryan has a notable record of successful startup exits in his career that spans 25 years in tech. In earlier companies, as you will hear today, the Steelberg brothers applied large-scale data processing to advertising before that was commonplace and were instrumental in the development of what we now call programmatic advertising. Veritone today provides an AI platform, aiWare, that applies large-scale processing of unstructured data to a variety of use cases that range from revenue generation to back-office operations. Prior to Veritone, Ryan was CEO of Brand Affinity technologies, Head of Radio at Google after the acquisition of dMarc Broadcasting where he was president and co-founder, CEO of 2CAN Media, and President of AdForce, a company he co-founded while still an undergrad at UCLA.
S1 E221 · Tue, August 10, 2021
Bernadette Nixon CEO of Algolia the Unicorn Search and AI Company
Bernadette Nixon is CEO of Algolia, a company that processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year for over 10,000 customers. She joined the company in early 2020 in the midst of the global pandemic and what turned out to be explosive growth. Prior to Algolia, Nixon was CEO of Alfresco, President of SDL, and an SVP at OpenText. She has worked across the spectrum of search from pure SaaS solutions to open source and now is steering the API-first solution approach at Algolia which includes elements of customized programmability and SaaS. We go deep this week on search, how it is evolving, and the nuances of voice search. We also discuss Algolia's recent $150 million funding round which conferred unicorn status on the company with a valuation exceeding $2 billion.
S1 E220 · Sat, August 07, 2021
Conversations with Things Authors Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe
Conversation designers Diana Deibel and Rebecca Evanhoe discuss the practical knowledge required to design effective conversations with things such as chatbots and voice assistants. We also discuss the evolution of conversation design over time and across modes of interaction. Diana Deibel is a director at Grand Studio where she helps clients create user-focused experiences, including many that involve voice user interfaces. Before Grand Studio, Deibel was a VUX design lead at Allstate, voice user interface designer at Emmi Solutions, and a media producer. Rebecca Evanhoe is a visiting assistant professor at the Pratt Institute where she teaches a graduate course in conversational user experience design. She is also a founding contributor to Women in Voice and earlier was a conversation design consultant at AWS and Mobiquity and a writing instructor at the University of Florida.
S1 E219 · Sun, July 25, 2021
Natalie Monbiot of Hour One on Virtual Humans Automated Video Production and More
Natalie Monbiot is head of strategy and business development for Hour One. She is working with companies across a number of industries as varied as real estate, eLearning, automotive, and consumer brands and is shaping Hour One's go-to-market and growth strategies. Prior to Hour One, Monbiot was an SVP at Publicis where she worked on new technologies and the Samsung account. She was an SVP at UM Worldwide before that focused on digital and strategic innovation and earlier in her career worked at IPG Media Lab and also previously worked in media planning for fortune 500 clients. Monbiot earned a Masters's Degree from Oxford.
S1 E218 · Thu, July 22, 2021
Yakir Buskilla CEO of CoCoHub Talks Chatbots and Virtual Humans
Yakir Buskilla is CEO and co-founder of Cocohub, a publicly traded company on the Israeli stock exchange best known for its no-code chatbot development suite. Recently, the company is increasingly associated with virtual human technology, and Anna, one of the characters it developed as a chatbot avatar for deployment on Zoom and through other video channels. Buskilla took over as CEO after several years at Nielsen where he oversaw the company's R&D operation in Israel. Earlier, he co-founded Semanix which was focused on improving patent search technology. He has a background in Machine Learning, Big Data, cloud hosting, and back-end software development and began his career as a software engineer.
S1 E217 · Mon, July 12, 2021
Orchid Bertelsen Head of Digital at Nestle Talks Virtual Humans and Alexa Projects
Orchid Bertelsen is head of digital strategy and innovation at Nestle USA. She has created the digital innovation road maps for over 40 Nestle brands as well as delivering new projects such as Ruth the cookie coach virtual human. Prior to Nestle, Orchid spent several years in the digital agency world and in consulting. Today we discuss the anatomy of a virtual human project for a consumer brand - the rationale, the tech, the project stages, and more. We also discuss Alexa skill development for consumer brands circa 2016 and how that shaped the development of a virtual human cookie coach in 2021.
S1 E216 · Mon, July 05, 2021
File Progress Brandon Kaplan CEO of Skilled Creative Discusses the Rise of Voice in Media and Commerce
Brandon Kaplan is CEO of Skilled Creative, an agency he founded in 2017 that focuses on helping leading media and consumer brands deploy voice technologies for user engagement and commerce. Today, we discuss his firm's work with HBO, Pottermore, Meredith, and a few consumer brands along with dominant trends in the industry. Kaplan received an outstanding achievement award for industry contributions from Project Voice in 2021. Prior to his current agency, Kaplan was President of Ruxly Creative and co-founder of Evantage. He began his career at Stanley Black and Decker.
S1 E215 · Mon, June 28, 2021
Dr Joan Palmiter Bajorek Founder of Women in Voice
Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is founder and CEO of the non-profit Women in Voice which was started in 2018. She is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space, a popular conference speaker, and a consultant for voice user experience design. After earning an undergraduate degree in French, Photography, and Graphic Design, Bajorek received a Masters in Linguistics from UC Davis and then of PhD in speech language technology from the University of Arizona. Today we discuss the latest growth figures and activities for Women in Voice, a recent VC elevator pitch event for female founders in the voice AI industry, and some of the latest trends in voice user experience design.
S1 E214 · Sun, June 20, 2021
Brad Stone Author of Amazon Unbound
Brad Stone is the New York Times bestselling author of two books about Amazon, The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound. Together, they tell a complete story of Amazon over 25 years of evolution. Amazon Unbound includes an in-depth look at the origin behind Amazon Alexa and Echo and their implications for the industry. Stone is a senior executive editor overseeing tech industry reporting at Bloomberg News. He began his tech reporting career at Newsweek covering Silicon Valley and was later a technology correspondent for the New York Times before joining Bloomberg in 2010.
S1 E213 · Tue, June 15, 2021
Joseph Turow Author of Voice Catchers on Voice Tech, Marketing and Privacy
Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication -- the same school where he earned his PhD. Turow is the author of over 150 articles and 10 books including the recently published The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet. He has some pointed critiques of how voice technology is used, what should change, and where we need further debate. We go point-by-point through many of these arguments and find both common ground and areas of disagreement I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion in part because so often I only hear people in our industry discuss the technology's benefits. I don't agree with all of Professor Turow's conclusions but I recognize that he is addressing a series of important questions that many people in the industry mostly ignore.
S1 E212 · Mon, June 07, 2021
Ian Freed CEO of Bamboo Learning and Head of Amazon Devices When Alexa Launched
Ian Freed is co-founder and CEO of Bamboo Learning, the creators of award-winning Alexa skills for childhood education. As you know, 2020 changed everything in education and Bamboo is filling an interesting gap for in-home learning since 2018. Before Bamboo, Ian spent nearly 13 years at Amazon. While there he served in the coveted Tech Assistant to the CEO role where he was Jeff Bezos' shadow for a year. Afterward, Freed become Vice President of Kindle and then Vice President of Amazon Devices. While in the devices leadership role, the development and launch of Amazon Echo, Alexa, and Fire Phone all reported up to him. That is some unique insight for you today. We discuss Ed Tech, how COVID-19 and quarantine changed education, the early days of Echo and Alexa, and how the market has evolved.
S1 E211 · Mon, May 31, 2021
Danny Tomsett CEO of UneeQ Talks Virtual Humans
Danny Tomsett is the founder and CEO of UneeQ. He founded the company in 2009. It was originally called FaceMe and was focused on video chat with humans for customer service. The idea was ahead of its time. Several years ago the company shifted to the virtual human solution at a time when conversational AI and visual rendering techniques were just coming into their own. UneeQ today is one of the leaders in software for creating virtual humans for customer contact centers, marketing, and other applications. The company may be best known for its digital einstein virtual human which you can interact with at digitalhumans.com.
S1 E210 · Mon, May 24, 2021
Lauren Kunze CEO of Pandorabots on Chatbots and Virtual Humans
Lauren Kunze became CEO of Pandorabots in 2013. However, her involvement with the company goes back to 2002. As a teenager she developed one of the first chatbots, Lauren bot, using the company's technology. So, Lauren has had a front row seat to the many phases of bot development. Twenty years' worth of insights. She graduated from Harvard with degrees in English and Neurobiology. Pandorabots has over a quarter of a million registered developers on its platforms, has been used to create more than 300,000 chatbots, and has managed 75 billion conversational interactions. They also have the award-winning Kuki virtual human.
S1 E209 · Mon, May 17, 2021
Rob Hayes Head of Product at Voiceflow Talks Conversation Experience Design
Rob Hayes is head of product at Voiceflow. He spent the past 18 months helping transform the no-code builder for Alexa skills into a multi-platform design and prototyping solution for enterprise-grade conversational experiences. Today, Voiceflow has over 60,000 users of its software which offers some unique insights into trends for the conversation design and development communities. Prior to Voiceflow, Hayes had an independent product management consultancy. His work included a nine-month tour as interim head of product at Ada, the AI-backed chatbot company that recently achieved unicorn status after a $130 million funding round.
S1 E208 · Wed, May 12, 2021
Audioburst Co-founders Amir Hirsh and Gal Klein
Amir Hirsh (CEO) and Gal Klein (CTO) are co-founders of Audioburst. We gathered in Clubhouse to discuss analyzing, segmenting, packaging and making talk audio content discoverable in real-time. Audioburst is doing this daily on millions of minutes of radio and podcast content and the same technology could be applied to social audio. We discuss how it could make social audio conversations more easily discoverable in the moment and enable the best elements of those discussions to be easily accessed afterward.
S1 E207 · Wed, May 05, 2021
Spotify Voice AI and Social Audio Strategy with Messina, Kemp, Schwartz and Greenberg
Spotify recently released a custom voice assistant called 'Hey Spotify,' acquired (then rebranded) Locker Room as the foundation of a new social audio feature, and announced a new in-car voice-interactive device for audio content while on the go. I gathered some Spotify experts in Clubhouse to break down Spotify's voice AI and social audio strategy and its implications. Guests include: Air Greenberg - Formerly head of voice marketing at Spotify Dave Kemp - Creator of Future Ear Radio Chris Messina - Former product leader at Google & Uber, one of the earliest U.S. users of Spotify Eric Schwartz - Head writer at Voicebot.ai
S1 E206 · Mon, April 26, 2021
Dr. Patricia Scanlon of SoapBox Labs Talks Voice AI and Education
Dr. Patricia Scanlon is CEO and co-founder of SoapBox Labs, the leading company focused on voice recognition technology for children. Most voice recognition solutions today are optimized for adult speakers and have high error rates when applied to children's vocal patterns which are constrained by immature biological development and language proficiency. SoapBox Labs was created to fill this gap in ASR performance for kids. In today's interview, Scanlon discusses the EdTech market, the changing perceptions of venture capital related to the segment, new applications for speech recognition for children, and how COVID-19 has impacted the market. Dr. Patricia Scanlon earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and then went on to complete her PhD in speech recognition with a focus on signal processing and machine learning at the University College Dublin. Those studies included research at both Columbia University and IBM. That was followed by seven years on the research staff at Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent before founding SoapBox Labs.
S1 E205 · Sat, April 17, 2021
Nuance Acquired by Microsoft: Breaking Down the $20B Deal
Microsoft announced a $20 billion acquisition of Nuance this past week and Voicebot invited four experts in the field to help break down why the deal makes sense and what it means for the industry. Kavita Reddi is co-founder of Voxta, a provider of automated speech recognition technology for call centers and embedded products. Tom Hebner is vice president of Nueraflash and previously spent a dozen years as head of innovation for voice and AI technology at Nuance. Nate Treloar is co-founder and president of Orbita a leading provider of conversational AI technologies to healthcare providers. Paul Sweeney is co-founder and EVP of product at Webio a conversational AI middleware provider for contacts centers in financial services and collections.
S1 E204 · Sun, April 11, 2021
Voice Games with Doppio, Drive.fm, Matchbox.io, and Volley
Today, we talk voice-first games, other interactive audio content, and creating voice experiences for the smart speaker, smartphone, and in the car. Our guests have many years of successful game development for voice and on other platforms. Sarah Andrew Wilson is Chief Content Officer of Matchbox.io which is better known for its popular games voice games such as Question of the Day, Guess My Name, and Kids Quiz. Matchbox began building games as Alexa Skills and now also has a mobile app and podcast. We discuss that migration in today's discussion. Max Child is CEO and co-founder of Volley, a game maker that began with conversational experiences for messaging apps that went all-in on Alexa skill games and now also has a mobile app for its games and podcasts. Some of its well-known games include Song Quiz, Yes Sire, and Popcorn Tycoon. Doppio Games co-founder and CEO Jeferson Valadares has a long history in the gaming industry for mobile, console, and desktop that included executive roles at EA and Bandai Namco. Doppio is known for its Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant games The Vortex, The 3% Challenge, and Pac-Man Waka Waka. Rounding out our speaker roster is Niko Vuori, CEO of Drive.fm. The Drive.fm mobile app is built for commuters and offers a wide range of entertainment options including interactive quizzes such as the Drivetime show, Jeopardy which includes voice tracks from Alex Trebeck, and other audio entertainment. Niko is another games industry veteran having co-founded Rocket Games and holding past executive roles at ToyTalk and Zynga.
S1 E203 · Mon, April 05, 2021
Per Ottosson CEO of Artificial Solutions
Per Ottosson is CEO of Artificial Solutions, the Sweden-based maker of Teneo software used for building custom chatbots, virtual assistants, and conversational interfaces in over 80 languages. He joined the company in 2020 after a decade in leadership roles at IPSoft and two decades in enterprise software. Teneo is a popular software solution for contact centers that is also used for product integrations and marketing applications. The company's big focus of late has been its partnership with Microsoft which includes integration with the LUIS NLU and access to Teneo through the Azure cloud. We discuss where the industry has been, what's driving activity today, and where we are headed.
S1 E202 · Sun, March 28, 2021
Brian Crannell SVP of Knowles on Tiny Speakers and MEMs Mics
Tiny microphones and speakers are key enablers of the voice assistant revolution. From smart speakers to smart wireless earbuds (hearables), the audio components make it possible for voice assistants to communicate. Knowles Corporation is a leading supplier of these audio components for edge devices selling about $800 million in revenue annually. Brian Crannell is the SVP that oversees the development of audio solutions. He has been with Knowles for a decade, has degrees in mechanical engineering and law, and 25 years in consumer electronics.
S1 E201 · Sun, March 21, 2021
Bahubali Shete CEO of TinyChef on His Journey to 1M Voice App Users and New Voice Commerce Features on Alexa
Bahubali Shete founded TinyChef in 2016 (originally known as Klovechef) as an IoT-plus-voice interactive cooking experience and pivoted to an ML-based and software-only solution two years later. That move led to the company's Sanjeev Kapoor Recipes becoming the number one Alexa skill in India for cooking and the default first-party solution for Amazon in the country. TinyChef Alexa skills are also available in the U.S. and Canada and recently implemented the new Alexa Shopping Cart beta for in-skill voice commerce transactions. We discuss Shete's journey to 1 million users, the success of his voice commerce initiatives so far, and the behavior of users when employing voice apps for cooking and meal planning activities.
S1 E200 · Sun, March 14, 2021
Aakrit Vaish CEO of Haptik
Aakrit Vaish is CEO and co-founder of Haptik an enterprise SaaS solution for building conversational AI-based intelligent assistants. The company's clients range from Samsung and Oyo to KFC, Coca-Cola, Club Mahindra, and Zurich Insurance. Haptik was acquired by Reliance Jio in 2019 for $100 million. It has a large user base in customer service applications but has more recently expanded its offerings in conversational e-commerce. Haptik customers have managed over 2 billion conversations on 100 million devices. Vaish founded Hapitk in 2013 after several years as director of ops and the India business at Flurry, the leading mobile app analytics platform. He has an engineering degree from the University of Illinois.
S1 E199 · Sat, March 13, 2021
3 More Clubhouse Power Users Offer Social Audio Insights with Mitch Joel, Kate O'Neill, and Teri Fisher
Three guests join to share their social audio insights, how Clubhouse is evolving and approaches for using the social network. Mitch Joel (4:02) is well-known for the book and podcast both named Six Pixels of Separation. He is also a highly sought-after speaker on tech trends. Kate O'Neill (20:54) is author of Pixels in Place, a tech humanist, and an optimistic futurist. She is also a popular speaker at conferences and corporate events. Dr. Teri Fisher (39:30) is a sport and exercise physician, voice industry influencer, and creator of the Voice Den.
S1 E198 · Mon, March 08, 2021
How to Use Clubhouse with Monique Howard, Tyler Crowley, and Adriana Freitas
Three guests today share their Clubhouse experience and offer several strategies on how to get the most out of the new social audio network. Perspectives are shared from a voice AI tech startup founder, a tech event organizer, and venture capital investor. 5:02 - Monique Howard, Founder & CEO of Smarticles (mysmarticles.com) 18:43 - Tyler Crowley, Founder, Sthlm Tech Meetup / Week / Fest (sthlm.tech) 39:58 - Adriana Freitas, Partner at Muster Ventures and Deep Green Impact Ventures (musterventures.com)
S1 E197 · Mon, March 01, 2021
Ilya Gelfenbeyn, Founding CEO of API.ai (Acquired by Google and Now Dialogflow)
Ilya Gelfenbeyn was the founding CEO of API.ai. He and his team were true pioneers in the voice AI industry and were rewarded for those efforts through an acquisition by Google in 2016. API.ai was the development environment that most of the first Google Actions were built upon along with tens of thousands of chatbots. It is better known today as Dialogflow after a rebranding in 2017, and is one of the most widely used solutions for building conversational AI experiences. What you may not know is that API.ai was preceded by Speaktoit which was known as the Siri of Android. Speaktoit amassed over 40 million users for the app-based virtual assistant. The experience taught the team a lot about the tooling required to deploy a successful conversational assistant. That ultimately led to the creation of developer tools and the pivot into API.ai which we discuss in today's interview. Gelfenbeyn later was a founding member of Google Assistant investments where he was involved in direct funding of several prominent voice AI startups. Today he leads an angel syndicate called The AI where he invests in AI-related companies.
S1 E196 · Fri, February 26, 2021
Clubhouse Analysis with Power Users Balaji, LGO, and Soccolich
Today we interview three active users of Clubhouse in our series around the rise of social audio. Vajresh Balaji is first with his analysis of total Clubhouse users and how the app has changed over the past six months. Laura Gassner Otting is a best-selling author of the book Limitless and corporate consultant. She also hosts some of the most popular rooms in Clubhouse. Our final guest is Adam Soccolich, the creator of The Best of Clubhouse newsletter and website. He offers insights on a variety of different ways users employ the app and highlights on the recent developments.
S1 E195 · Sun, February 21, 2021
Jeremiah Owyang Analyzes the Rise of Social Audio on Clubhouse, Twitter and More
Jeremiah Owyang is tech analyst that is closely tracking the rise of social audio networks. In this week's interview, we discuss Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and some of the 25 other social audio startups he monitors. Jeremiah weighs in on six product categories that are growing up around social audio along with business models, monetization strategies, and predictions. We also evaluate the intersection of social audio and voice AI technology. Owyang is a founding partner of technology research firm Kaleido Insights. He previously worked as an analyst at Forrester and was a co-founder of Altimeter Group. He began his career as a UX designer and today is known for his work as a tech analyst, startup advisor, and angel investor.
S1 E194 · Mon, February 15, 2021
Rachael Tatman PhD Linguist and Rasa Senior Developer Advocate
Rachael Tatman has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington and began testing voice assistant speech recognition systems like Amazon Alexa from a research perspective in 2016. Today, Rachael is Senior Developer Advocate at open source conversational AI startup Rasa. She marries a deep computational and data science background with an understanding of linguistics to provide a unique view on conversational AI design and performance.
S1 E193 · Fri, February 12, 2021
Vijay Balasubramaniyan CEO of Pindrop on Voice Identification Use Cases
Vijay Balasubramaniyan is CEO of Pindrop, a leader in voice authentication technology for call centers. The interview was conducted on Clubhouse to discuss a new expansion of Pindrop to personalized consumer experiences such as media access on TiVo. Vijay co-founded Pindrop in 2011 after completing his PhD in computer science at Georgia Tech. Earlier in his career, Vijay was a research engineer at IBM and software engineer at Siemens and Intel. He first appeared on the Voicebot Podcast in Episode 86.
S1 E192 · Sun, February 07, 2021
Conversation Design Institute co-founder and CEO Hans van Dam
Hans van Dam began his career as a copywriter for science and technology companies and that role led him to become a chatbot designer in 2014. His experience working in conversational design led to the realization that few enterprises had a standard model for conversational user experience development nor did they have any idea how to staff a team for success. In 2018, Hans co-founded the Conversation Design Institute to establish processes, techniques, and organizational standards to professionalize the role of conversation design within large enterprises. Today we talk about the present and future of conversation design and how it will shape the future of conversational experiences.
S1 E191 · Mon, February 01, 2021
Rohit Prasad Amazon VP and Head Scientist for Alexa AI
Rohit Prasad is vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI at Amazon. He joined the Alexa team pre-launch in 2013 as director of machine learning before moving up to his current role in 2016. In our conversation, we discuss his long-time hope for Star Trek-like technologies, his initial impressions of Siri when it launched, his first day on the Alexa team, the reaction of early adopters, first-party versus third-party experiences, Alexa custom assistants, and much more. Prior to Amazon, Prasad spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon and BBN before its acquisition by Raytheon as a scientist working on speech and voice technologies mostly for government-funded projects. His graduate research at Illinois Institute of Technology focused on low bit-rate speech coding for wireless applications back in the late 1990s.
S1 E190 · Sun, January 24, 2021
Cheryl Platz Author of Design Beyond Devices on Multimodal Voice UX
Cheryl Platz is the author of the new book "Design Beyond Devices, creating multimodal cross-device experiences" published by Rosenfeld. Platz is currently the principal UX designer for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She was on the core team that launched the Echo Look which was Amazon's attempt to inject Alexa into fashion selection. That was preceded by time working on Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant. She began her career as a game producer at EA and Griptonite. Platz is also a cast member and instructor for Unexpected Productions Seattle, an improv comedy troupe and earned a degree in computer science with a focus on human-computer interaction from Carnegie-Mellon University.
S1 E189 · Wed, January 20, 2021
2021 Voice AI Predictions Part 2 with Paquiot, Kibbe, Palmiter-Bajorek, and Kemp
Here is Part 2 of our 2021 voice AI predictions. On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. Today, we go deeper with four guests that add some detail to their thinking around Voice AI in 2021. Topics covered include multimodal design, multimodal displays in healthcare, AI and ethics, voice on mobile, audio and Spotify. Malaika Paquiot, VP Product K4Connect - 4:10 Roger Kibbe, Senior Developer Evangelist Viv Labs/Samsung - 16:57 Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Head of User Research NLX - 34:30 Dave Kemp, Business Development Oaktree Products - 48:50
S1 E188 · Mon, January 18, 2021
2021 Voice AI Predictions Part 1 with Thadani, Tingiris, Stapleton, and Fields
On January 1st, we published over 100 predictions from 50 industry leaders. We go a little deeper with four guests today that elaborate on their thinking in Part 1 of our 2021 voice AI predictions episodes. Topics covered include owned/custom voice assistants, first-party voice experiences, virtual humans, and the view of UX designers regarding voice. Nithya Thadani, CEO RAIN Agency - 4:02 Steve Tingiris, CEO Dabble Lab - 17:17 Amy Stapleton, Co-founder Chatables - 38:18 Jason Fields, Chief Strategy Officer Voicify - 53:38
S1 E187 · Sun, January 10, 2021
India 2020 Voice AI Year in Review with Haptik, Slang Labs, Klove Chef, and Women in Voice
Today, we have one last Voice AI Year in Review episode. This one is focused on what went down in India in 2020. Today's guests are some of the top Voice AI leaders in India and they share everything from what is happening in voice commerce, WhatsApp, and assistants on feature phones to how Indian consumers differ from the U.S. and much more. 3:24 - Aarkrit Vaish, founder and CEO of Haptik 18:40 - Kumar Rangarajan, Co-founder and CEO of Slang Labs 30:48 - Sarandeep Kaur, co-founder of Women in Voice in India, and conversational AI manager for Novo Nordisk 47:43 - Bahubali Shete, CEO of Klove Chef
S1 E186 · Mon, January 04, 2021
Joe Petro CTO and EVP of R&D at Nuance
Joe Petro is CTO and EVP of R&D for Nuance and has been with the company since 2009. Nuance is a voice giant doing $1.5 billion in annual revenue and has a valuation of over $12 billion today. For over a decade, Nuance essentially defined the voice industry holding many of its most significant patents and dominating several market sectors. Joe oversees an annual R&D budget of over $200 million including new features such as Ambient AI and a COVID-19 bot. Prior to Nuance, Joe was SVP of research and development at Eclipsys, an early leader in electronic medical records. He began his career as a systems engineer at EDS, has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in Computer-Aided Engineering.
S1 E185 · Tue, December 29, 2020
Voice AI in Europe Year-in-Review 2020 with 169 Labs, Soapbox Labs, and Voxalyze
Today we talk about voice AI adoption and trends in Europe for 2020. My guests include Niamh Bushnell, chief communications officer of Soapbox Labs, Dominik Meissner, co-founder of 169 Labs, and Alexis Hue, founder and managing director of Voxalyze. The guests provide a broad perspective given that Soapbox offers ASR tech for children in custom voice interactive experiences for education and entertainment, 169 Labs develops voice experiences for consumer brands and enterprises, and Voxalyze has a SaaS solution for voice app publishers looking to grow their audience. Today we discuss privacy, whether there is a voice assistant duopoly, custom assistants, voice and media, personalization, voice app developer disappointment, and much more all from a European perspective.
S1 E184 · Thu, December 24, 2020
Voice Developer Year in Review 2020 with Dabble Lab, Rumble Studio, and XAPPmedia
For 2020, we decided to have a voice developer-specific year-in-review episode to make sure we spent sufficient time focused on the events that were the most impactful for developers. We were lucky to get three very experienced guests to discuss topics ranging from voice on mobile and the rise of custom voice assistants to voice for customer support, the rise of audio, the hype/utility disconnect, messaging, COVID-19, and much more. Michael Myers is vice president of product and head of development at XAPPmedia. XAPP has brought more than 1200 Alexa skills and Google Actions live for several hundred companies. More recently, the company has introduced its machine teaching technologies for complex intent models and custom assistant development. Michael was honored as a Voicebot Top Leader in Voice for 2020 in the technologist category. Also joining us is Voicetech Carl. Carl Robinson is host of the Voicetech Podcast and CEO of Rumble Studio. He has hosted over 80 episodes of his own podcast but this week shares his thoughts as a guest commentator from his home in Paris. He talks a bit about Rumble Studio and its podcast interview automation technology as well as the news of the year. Carl was also honored as a Voicebot Top leader in Voice for 2020 in the influencer category. Steve Tingiris is CEO and founder of Dabble Lab, a leading developer of conversational AI-based experiences across numerous platforms. Dabble Lab has more than 200 YouTube video tutorials about developing voice interactive experiences on Alexa, Cortana, Twilio, Jovo, and more, with more than a million views combined. Steve is also a beta user of GPT-3 which we get into today.
S1 E183 · Sun, December 20, 2020
Voice AI 2020 Year in Review with Botmock, Matchbox.io, and Willowtree
This is Voicebot Podcast's fourth annual year-in-review episode. We discuss the year's top stories ranging from COVID, contact centers, and custom assistants to the voice AI shift to mobile and the convergence of chat and voice. Our guests joining the discussion include Tobias Dengel (CEO of Willowtree), Brielle Nickoloff (Head of product at Botmock), and Sarah Andrew Wilson (Chief Content Officer of Matchbox.io). This is the first of three year-in-review episodes. Upcoming are Developer and European perspectives.
S1 E182 · Sun, December 13, 2020
Igor Jablokov CEO of Pryon on Custom Voice Assistants for the Enterprise
Igor Jablokov is the founder and CEO of Pryon, a company that has set out to transform knowledge management in the enterprise with a self-training custom voice assistant that can easily integrate into multiple data sources and be deployed in hours. Pryon raised $20 million in 2019 led by Revolution after closing a $4.5 million seed round in late 2018. Jablokov is best known as the CEO of Yap, the company Amazon acquired to serve as the technical foundation of Alexa back in 2011. Earlier in his career, he spent 13 years in technical and management roles at IBM. He was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2013 and named a Top Leader in Voice for 2020 by Voicebot.
S1 E181 · Mon, December 07, 2020
James Chapman VP and GM of Music and Wearables at Qualcomm - Voicebot Podcast Ep 181
James Chapman is VP and GM of music and wearables at Qualcomm, which means he oversees both hearables and smart watches. Qualcomm is a driving force behind the chips that make each subsequent hearable generation more powerful and more power-efficient. Chapman arrived at Qualcomm in 2015 as part of the $2.4 billion CSR acquisition where he oversaw 400 engineers and later led the company's auto, CE, and IoT segments. Before CSR, Chapman spent many years in engineering and product roles at Broadcom. Since arriving at Qualcomm, among other accomplishments, Chapman oversaw the rollout of the QCC1541 chip which is the workhorse of the true wireless earbuds market today. He earned a PhD in condensed particle physics from Oxford and has an MBA from Henley Business School.
S1 E180 · Sun, November 29, 2020
Tom Livne CEO of Verbit on Automated Transcription and a $60M Funding Round - Voicebot Podcast Ep 180
Verbit just closed a $60M funding round after raising $30M earlier this year and $21M in 2019. We break down the company's AI-plus-human automated transcription business model, what is driving growth, and how the new funding will be employed. Tom Livne is CEO and co-founder of Verbit since 2017. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of AppInsight. Tom is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Technion and earned a law degree at IDC Herzliya. He previously appeared in episode 89 of Voicebot Podcast in early 2019.
S1 E179 · Mon, November 23, 2020
Dennis Crowley Co-founder of Foursquare and Creator of Marsbot
Dennis Crowley is co-founder and executive chairman of Foursquare, a pioneer in the rise of the mobile, local, and social apps famous for pioneering the venue check-in concept. Today, it supports popular consumer apps and a large enterprise business around consumer geolocation data. The company has 150,000 developer partners and says it powers location experiences for more than 1 billion people globally. Foursquare recently introduced Marsbot, an audio AR solution (i.e. a proactive walking assistant) that creates a reason to keep your hearables in all day when moving around a city or town. Marsbot harvests the nearly endless data from Foursquare's community and whispers nuggets of content to users as they go through specific locations. Crowley started out in the early dotcom days as a research analyst and then became known for organizing large scale games that integrated technology with real-world settings. He then founded Dodgeball which was location-based social software for mobile devices and was acquired by Google in 2005. That led to some time at Google as a product manager before co-founding Foursquare in 2009.
S1 E178 · Mon, November 16, 2020
Kane Simms Co-Founder of VUX World on Voice Strategy, User Experience, and Industry Trends
Kane Simms is co-founder of VUX World, a voice studio, design consultancy, and creator of a popular industry podcast and numerous LinkedIn videos. Today, we discuss voice user experience design and specifically cover some elements of VUX World's methodology when working with clients. We also review voice strategy, industry trends, and much more. Kane is an astute observer of the voice industry landscape and one of the technology's most effective champions.
S1 E177 · Mon, November 09, 2020
Dr Ben Goertzel CEO of SingularityNET and a Leader in Research for Artificial General Intelligence
Dr. Ben Goertzel is co-founder and CEO of SingularityNet, an open, decentralized platform for connecting and orchestrating interactions between artificial general intelligence (AGI) agents and other software. He has been a leader in the pursuit of AGI for over 20 years. Goertzel is also an innovator and researcher in NLP including a recent paper on unsupervised grammar induction. Earlier, Goertzel led the software team that produced the intelligence behind the world's most famous robot, Sophia, as chief scientist at Hanson Robotics. He is also chairman of OpenCog and of the Artificial General Intelligence Society. Dr. Goertzel earned a PhD in Mathematics from Temple University.
S1 E176 · Sat, October 31, 2020
David Patterson Chief Science Officer of Aiqudo Discusses NLU and Semiotics
Dr. Dave Patterson earned a PhD in artificial intelligence at Ulster University where he also led an AI research lab. He also has degrees in computer science and biochemistry. Dave spent 15 years as a senior lecturer at Ulster University before leaving to become the founding CEO of Sophia, an advanced search technology company that helped online publishers match advertising to reader interests. In 2017, Sophia Search was acquired by Aiqudo where Dave and his team added NLU capabilities to the Aiqudo action engine. Today we talk about AI, NLU, NLP, semiotics and symbolic language representations, and much more. We break down how Aiqudo's architecture is different from other popular voice assistant platforms and how that enables higher efficiency in NLU training through unsupervised learning as well as semantic understanding accuracy.
S1 E175 · Sat, October 24, 2020
Stanford Professor Monica Lam on the Almond Open Source Voice Assistant
Dr. Monica Lam joined Stanford University's computer science department in 1988 after earning a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. She is co-author of the textbook Compilers Principles, Techniques, and Tools, known as the Dragon Book. More recently she has been leading the Open Virtual Assistant initiative that has at its core, the Almond open source voice assistant. Today we talk about privacy, security, the need for choice of virtual assistants that are not controlled by 2 or 3 big companies, and the importance of reducing the cost of data annotation to make voice assistant development more accessible to a wider variety of organizations.
S1 E174 · Sun, October 18, 2020
Phillip Hunter Formerly of the Amazon Alexa UX Team and Founder of CCAI
Phillip Hunter is the founder of CCAI Services where he helps companies develop voice user experiences using conversation AI and ML solutions. He previously was a vice president of Pulse Labs, head of user experience for Alexa Skills at Amazon, a Senior UX manager at AWS, a senior designer for Bing and Tellme while at Microsoft, a senior designer at 24-7.ai with a few more stops along the way during his career. He earned a degree in English from Texas A&M University. Today we discuss voice UX principles, Phillip's experience in the industry, and whether Alexa is living up to its promise.
S1 E173 · Sun, October 11, 2020
Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek CEO of Women in Voice on Voice UX, Linguistics, and Building Community and Opportunity
Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek is CEO of Women in Voice an organization she founded in 2018. It has grown to 15 chapters in nine countries and has hosted over 80 events worldwide. Bajorek is an advisor to several companies in the voice AI space and a sought-after conference speaker and consultant for voice user experience design. After earning an undergraduate degree in French, Photography, and Graphic Design, Bajorek received a Masters in Linguistics from UC Davis and a PhD in speech language technology.
S1 E172 · Fri, October 02, 2020
Two Voice Devs Mark Tucker and Allen Firstenberg Talk Alexa, Google Assistant, and More
My guests today are long-time voice developers and well know leaders in the developer community. Mark Tucker is senior architect for voice technology at Soar.com and owner of Shazaml Design. He is also an Alexa Champion, Bixby Premiere Developer, and was named one of Voicebot's Top Leaders in Voice for 2019. He has a degree in Management Information Systems from Brigham Young University and 25 years of software development and architecture experience. Allen Firstenberg is project guru for Objective Consulting also with 25 years of software development experience. He earned a degree in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Allen is a Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant, IoT, Wearables, and other platforms. He first started developing for voice on Google Glass and then was one of the early developers on Google Assistant. Collectively Mark and Allen are the creators of the Two Voice Devs podcast and YouTube channel where they go deep on topics of interest to voice developers.
S1 E171 · Fri, October 02, 2020
Google Product Launch Hot Takes with Jefferson Graham of USA Today and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot - Voicebot Podcast Ep 171
Today I have another extra episode for you to discuss the announcements from Google's 2020 Fall product launch. We knew in advance that we would finally see a replacement for the Google Home which was launched four long years ago. The Nest Audio is that replacement as the flagship smart speaker for Google. Other than that, we were expecting a new Pixel smartphone, which we did see, and a new Chromecast, which also made an appearance. There wasn't much for the voice industry to sink their teeth into in terms of advances but I wanted to give you an update on what we did see and offer the perspectives of a couple of other event observers. To maintain consistency, I also asked Jefferson Graham of USA Today and Eric Schwartz of Voicebot.ai to join me. They were both on the recent episode focused on the Amazon product launch so we are getting their hot takes today in contrast to what we saw from Amazon. Jefferson Graham is the leading consumer tech reporter in the U.S. and Eric Schwartz is the lead reporter at Voicebot.
S1 E170 · Mon, September 28, 2020
Amazon Product Launch Event Hot Takes with CNET, Voicebrew, and USA Today
Today's episode is all about Amazon's big 2020 product launch event. We break down what was announced, what will be successful, and what it says about Amazon's product strategy. First up today you will hear my conversation with Ben Fox Rubin of CNET. He covers Amazon exclusively and joins me for the second year in a row. Next, we have my interview with Katherine Prescott of VoiceBrew, the most popular newsletter for Alexa users. Then, I throw down again with Jefferson Graham of USA Today. He was on our extra episode 169 which offered a preview of the event. We call out whether his, and my, predictions were right, and what consumers are really going to adopt among the new device offerings. I wrap up with Eric Schwartz, the head writer for Voicebot.ai. He has some interesting insights into services Amazon is pushing to keep people connected.
S1 E169 · Mon, September 21, 2020
Alexa 2020 Product Launch Preview with Jefferson Graham of USA Today
Amazon's 2020 product launch is coming up in a few days so Jefferson Graham of USA Today joins me for a preview of what to expect from Amazon during this year's event. We also look back at the many 2019 announcements and discuss which ones look like a success and which not so much. We talk about video, smart displays, smart TVs, Echo Frames (smart glasses), Echo Dot with clock, and more. It's your perfect companion for anticipating the 2020 launch even news. Jefferson Graham is the leading consumer tech journalist in the U.S. He has been a technology columnist for USA Today for the past twenty years and before that spent several years as the Tech Editor for Hollywood Reporter. In addition to being a columnist, Jeff writes the weekly Talking Tech newsletter and more impressively has published more than 1,500 episodes of the Talking Tech Podcast, which he records every day.
S1 E168 · Sun, September 20, 2020
James Vlahos of Hereafter AI Discusses Avatars That Preserve the Memories and Thoughts of Real People
James Vlahos is the founder of Hereafter AI, a company that enables anyone to create a chatbot avatar of a real person. James' interest in chatbots started in the 1980s on a Commodore PET computer and was rekindled in 2015 when, as a reporter, he wrote a story about PullString's work on Hello Barbie. That led to him creating Dadbot, a chatbot that captured the memories and thoughts of his father that at the time was battling Stage IV cancer. After completing a book on tech's many decades of voice assistant innovation called Talk to Me, James founded Hereafter AI in 2019. We discuss what he learned from his early experience with rudimentary chabot designs of the 1980s and how his experience building a chatbot to memorialize his father offered unique insights into the tradeoffs of these types of endeavors. We cover a series of questions James has not been asked before and he offers some interesting insights that will be of value to any voice assistant designer. James earned a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. Over his career, he has written for many publications including The New York Times, GQ, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, National Geographic Adventure, and WIRED.
S1 E167 · Sun, September 13, 2020
TalkSocket Co-Founders Andrew Delorenzo and Chandler Murch
TalkSocket just launched a Kickstarter for a physical product that makes Alexa (and other voice assistants) instantly accessible hands-free on any iPhone or Android smartphone. We talk about the product launch, the technical approach, the partnering strategy, and even how the company expects to eventually expand capabilities to China for Alibaba's and Baidu's voice assistants. Today's guests are Andrew Delorenzo and Chandler Murch, the co-founders of TalkSocket, a hardware device that makes Alexa hands free on iPhone and Android. It's a non-obvious innovation, but one that just might have the right ingredients for widespread consumer adoption. Delorenzo is CEO and has nearly a decade working in the cloud hosting business for AWS, Tencent, and Joyent. Murch is CTO for TalkSocket and has a background in IT management for companies such as game maker Valve and Ed Tech pioneer Promethean.
S1 E166 · Sun, September 06, 2020
Ian Bicking Talks Firefox Voice and Observations About Assistants Today
Ian Bicking spent 10 years at Mozilla as a software developer, engineering manager, and research engineer. His last project there was Firefox Voice, a custom voice assistant for the Firefox Browser. That experience led him to record his observations on the state of voice technology and conversational AI from a developer's perspective which he recorded in a 3,300-word blog post. Today, we discuss Bicking's 12-month journey building a custom voice assistant and what he learned. Before Mozilla, Bicking spent several years as a senior programmer at the Open Planning Project. He earned degrees in computer science and mathematics at Earlham College.
S1 E165 · Sun, August 30, 2020
Richard Weeks Head of Conversational Experiences at US Bank
Richard Weeks is head of conversational experiences at U.S. Bank. The company has an Alexa Skill, Google Action, chatbot, and a newly minted custom assistant now available through its mobile app. Today, we talk about what U.S. Bank has learned about voice and conversational user experiences and how that influenced the decision to launch a custom assistant. We also talk about his organization, the tech stack, objectives, and more. Richard has been with U.S. Bank for the past four years after nearly 23 years with Wells Fargo where he concluded his tenure as Senior Vice President for customer experience strategy after holding many leadership roles in product management. Richard earned an undergraduate degree from USC and an MBA from the University of San Francisco.
S1 E164 · Mon, August 24, 2020
Jeanine Heck VP of AI Products at Comcast
Jeanine Heck is vice president of AI product at Comcast, the top cable television provider in the U.S. with over 20 million subscribers for its Xfinity service. The company began shipping a voice-interactive TV remote app in 2013 and a voice-controlled physical remote for its cable boxes in 2015. In 2019, the Xfinity voice remote handled over 12 billion voice requests which suggests users are making an average of about 600 voice requests per year, up from about 200 three years ago. It is a heavily used custom assistant that has been proven at scale. Heck joined Comcast in 2007 and has overseen the Xfinity voice remote project since its inception in 2013. Earlier in her career, she was a programmer and then manager at Gemini systems. Heck earned a degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Columbia.
S1 E163 · Mon, August 17, 2020
Dor Skuler Co-Founder and CEO of Intuition Robotics - Voicebot Podcast Ep 163
Dor Skuler is CEO and co-founder of Initiation Robotics. He is a former board director for ClearPath Networks, Senior Vice President at Alcatel-Lucent, and officer in the IDF. Intuition Robotics was formed in 2015 to reimagine the relationship between humans and machines. The company's first product, ElliQ, is an interactive smart speaker for elder adults. It can respond to requests or proactively engage with users, has a screen, and can move to offer the robotic equivalent of body language. The solution is in beta testing today and the company has been collecting user data before a commercial launch. Toyota also recently tapped Intuition Robotics to provide its Q voice assistant designed for automotive use cases. The company recently closed a $36 million funding round and has raised $58 million to date.
S1 E162 · Fri, August 07, 2020
Top Voice AI Stories in the First Half of 2020 with Lau, Prescott and König
This week's roundtable discussion focuses on the top voice AI news from the first half of 2020. We, of course, talk about COVID-19 and how that is changing adoption patterns or the industry, smart speaker adoption figures, the voice app ecosystems and whether there is a voice app winter underway, and the rise of custom assistants, a shift to mobile and more. Guests this week include Theo Lau, founder of Unconventional Ventures, Katherine Prescott, founder of VoiceBrew, and Jan König, co-founder of Jovo.
S1 E161 · Sun, August 02, 2020
Harjinder Sandhu Founder and CEO of Saykara a Voice Assistant for Doctors
Harjinder Sandhu founded Saykara in 2015 but his journey into healthcare and voice began in 2000 when he founded Medremote which used speech recognition and machine learning to automate physician notes transcription for medical documentation. That company was eventually acquired by Nuance in 2006 and Sandhu stayed on as the healthcare group CTO until 2011. He then was a co-founder of a patient engagement platform called Twistle which is still operating today. But, the draw of voice technology advances led him to Saykara where he and his team are building a voice assistant for doctors and other clinicians. It's a great conversation about specialty assistants, the importance of workflow in healthcare, and the tech stack required to serve this highly demanding user base. Sandhu earned a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto and was a professor of computer science at York University before becoming a startup founder.
S1 E160 · Mon, July 27, 2020
Todd Mozer CEO of Sensory Talks Custom Assistants
Todd Mozer is founder, Chairman, and CEO of Sensory. The company has provided voice and AI technology for 3 billion devices over 25 years. Sensory's technology stack can be used to deploy a custom assistant in an appliance or mobile app and also has individual features for wake word, biometric login, and more. Sensory customers include Amazon, AT&T, Garmin, Google, GoPro, Huawei, Motorola, and Sony to name a few. Todd is a graduate of Stanford Business School and UC Santa Barbara. He also studied computer science at UC Berkeley in between.
S1 E159 · Mon, July 20, 2020
Peter Durlach SVP of Healthcare Strategy at Nuance
Peter Durlach started out in Audiology technology in the 1980s and then quickly transitioned to speech technology in 1988 at Articulate Systems which was acquired by Lernout and Hauspie in 1999. He then moved on to lead Unveil Technologies, a pioneer in the contact center segment. Eventually, Durlach wound up at Nuance twice with a brief interlude at the hospital system UPMC. Today, Durlach leads Nuance's $1 billion healthcare business which includes solutions used by over 85% of radiologists and 65% of physicians that incorporate speech recognition, dictation, and custom assistants into their daily practice activities. In our conversation, we discuss Pete's three decades in the speech and voice technology, building custom assistants, and where voice is and will be making a big difference in healthcare.
S1 E158 · Mon, July 13, 2020
Scott Stephenson CEO and Cofounder of Deepgram
Scott Stephenson is cofounder and CEO of Deepgram. He earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Michigan with a focus on Machine Learning. He then spent time building a system designed to detect dark matter two miles underground. That experience inadvertently introduced Scott and a colleague to the limitations of speech recognition systems which to their surprise were not using the same deep learning architecture with hardware acceleration they had built to detect dark matter activity. It ultimately led to founding Deepgram in 2015 as a new model for automated speech recognition. The company added 12 million in funding in March of 2020.
S1 E157 · Sun, July 05, 2020
Alan Nichol CTO and Co-founder of Rasa
Alan Nichol co-founded Rasa in December 2016. Rasa began life as an open source NLU for chatbots and has expanded to other features, including voice interactivity. The company raised $13 million in venture funding in 2019 and came back about twelve months later with a $26 million funding round in 2020 after showing strong growth numbers in both open source downloads and new enterprise clients. Nichol is CTO at Rasa and before that was co-founder and CTO of a Techstars-backed productivity startup that had a conversational angle. He earned a PhD in Engineering from Cambridge with a machine learning focus. He also has an advanced degree in chemical physics from the University of Edinburgh. Today, we talk about the conversational AI stack, chatbots, voice, open source, and where we are headed with custom assistants.
S1 E156 · Sun, June 28, 2020
Punit Soni Founder and CEO of Suki the Voice Assistant for Healthcare
Punit Soni is founder and CEO of Suki. The company provides a specialty voice assistant for doctors and other clinicians and he elaborates how its features go beyond the earlier technologies associated with medical dictation and transcription. The company was founded in 2017 and has raised more than $40 million since that time. Earlier, Punit was Chief Product Officer at Flipkart and Vice President of Product Management at Motorola while it was a division of Google. At Motorola, he oversaw the rollout of Moto X which was one of the first smartphones to include a voice assistant. He was also a Lead Product Manager at Google and began his career as a software engineer. Soni earned an MBA from Wharton and an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wyoming.
S1 E155 · Sun, June 21, 2020
Mike Zagorsek of SoundHound Discusses What it Takes to Deploy a Custom Voice Assistant
Mike Zagorsek is vice president of product marketing at SoundHound. Prior to SoundHound, Zagorsek was head of product marketing at Square and Leap Motion, and before that was Director of Interactive at Apple. Way back in 1999, he was a Manager at Sapient where he helped companies enter the digital age much like he is now ushering them into the voice age. SoundHound is a leading white label solution for building custom voice assistants and has made news recently for powering Snapchat's new assistant. In today's interview, we discuss that implementation along with Pandora, Mercedes, and others.
S1 E154 · Mon, June 15, 2020
Hey Swisscom Custom Voice Assistant Launch Journey with Riccardo Lopetrone and MIsha Zivkovic
Voice at Swisscom began in 2015 with a voice interactive TV remote. The voice assistant Hey Swisscom emerged five years later in November 2019. Misha Zivkovic and Riccardo Lopetrone learned a lot in both versions of their voice-enabled products and they share the details behind the voice assistant in today's extended discussion. Do you think you could design and build a custom assistant in 9 months? Swisscom just did. We discuss their journey with voice, tech stack, objectives, and more. Misha Zivkovic is Program Manager for voice at Swisscom and Riccardo Lopetrone is Senior Product Manager for Voice, a role he began in 2015.
S1 E153 · Sun, June 07, 2020
BBC Head of Voice and AI Andy Webb Discusses the Custom Voice Assistant Beeb
Andy Webb is head of product for voice and AI at BBC Worldwide as VP of Product Strategy. BBC has been a pioneer in supporting consumer assistants globally such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. It is prominent in the UK but also provides skills and Actions in many other countries as well. It is also one of the most respected news organizations worldwide so Amazon and Google are incentivized to make sure BBC is available through there assistants. Last August, BBC announced it would create a new voice assistant of its own called Beeb. The organization is not abandoning Alexa or Google Assistant. Instead, Webb tells me that they are supplementing their work on these platforms. Beeb is more than an assistant. It's BBC's own internal conversational engine that can enable custom assistants deployed through desktop and mobile apps as well as support the many voice assistants that want access to BBC content. Media is one of the most popular and most important segments for voice assistants today. BBC is developing the Beeb to offer richer functionality than you could ever provide on the general-purpose consumer assistant platforms because of the limitations they impose on third-parties. Andy Webb joined BBC in 2106 and has been head of the voice and AI group since it was formed in 2017. Before his time at BBC, Webb was EMEA regional manager for Imagine Communications, head of product management for digital platforms at Arqiva and Product Development lead at Sky among other roles.
S1 E152 · Sun, May 31, 2020
Alan AI CEO Ramu Sunkara Talks Voice Assistants for Enterprise Apps
My guest today is Ramu Sunkara, co-founder and CEO of Alan AI. In 2014, Ramu co-founded a company called Synqq which was a voice assistant for meetings. Sometimes startups are for learning. Synqq educated Ramu and his co-founder that enterprises truly needed voice for enterprise apps. That led to the creation of Alan AI which has been his focus since 2017. Earlier in his career, Ramu was co-founder and CEO of Qik which was a video streaming solution for mobile and was acquired by Skype in 2011. Before that, he spent 11 years at Oracle, serving in, among other roles, vice president of e-Business suite technology, and vice president of real-time collaboration technologies. Ramu was trained as a software engineer and holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin and earned an MBA at Boston University.
S1 E151 · Sun, May 24, 2020
Specialty and Custom Voice Assistant Design with VUI Agency's Esslinger, Hassan, and Baumeister
Over the past few weeks, I have brought in executives from three companies with specialty assistants that have shown early promise: Deutsche Telekom, Josh.ai, and Aider. Today, we take a different angle on this topic and focus specifically on the design of specialty assistants. And, we invited a crew that has worked on multiple specialty assistants over the past few years. My guests are Christophe Esslinger, Mohamed Hassan. and Dr. Barbara Baumeister all from VUI Agency in Germany. Christophe is Director of VUI Agency and a co-founder. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Mannheim and later was a co-founder of Botflux, a chatbot technology and UX design firm. He launched VUI Agency in 2017. Hassan is a Voice AI Experience Architect and design lead. Before VUI he worked at Denkwerk in Cologne as a senior experience designer, also working primarily in voice interactive solutions. He has a master's degree in integrated design from the Koln International School of Design and is studying for his PhD. Barbara is Voice Architect with previous experience working on Cortana at Microsoft and has a PhD in phonetics and language processing from the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. We cover a wide range of topics from their work with Swisscom and other companies defining voice assistant personas, establishing a structured voice assistant design process, working with internal client teams, and much more.
S1 E150 · Sun, May 17, 2020
Brendan Roberts Founder and CEO of Aider Discusses Specialty Assistants for Small Business
Brendan Roberts founded Aider in 2017 after more than 15 years helping small businesses with their communications and IT needs. Roberts hacked together a specialty voice assistant using off-the-shelf technologies in 2017 to prove that it could help address common problems faced by small businesses. He then launched Aider as a specialty assistant for small business managers more than a year ago in New Zealand and Australia and then in July expanded to North America. Aider helps small businesses by integrating with a variety of third-party solutions they already use today ranging from accounting to inventory and marketing. The assistant makes it easier to access the information in those systems today and soon will also enable the execution of voice-directed actions. The assistant can be accessed via the Aider mobile app or through popular general-purpose assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant. In December, the company closed a seed round of funding which included Coca-Cola's investment arm. Previously, Brendan was a co-founder of 9 Spokes an IT services company in New Zealand. Before that he spent many years in telecom at Vodaphone in New Zealand and Carphone Warehouse in London. We talk getting started, the role for specialty assistants, build or buy decisions for technology, managing through COVID when you see your customer's revenues fall off a cliff before they do, and more.
S1 E149 · Sun, May 10, 2020
Alex Capecelatro CEO of Josh AI Talks Specialty Independent Assistants for the Home
Alex Capecelatro and his co-founder started Josh.ai in 2015 though the technology development preceded that by almost five years. Josh.ai is solely focused on creating assistant-enabled luxury home automation that supports both touch and voice interaction but Alex tells me it can go much further in the market as well. The company has its own smart speakers, its own assistant and enough momentum to recently raise $11 million from investors on top of an earlier round of $8 million. Alex previously was founder of Yeti which was acquired in 2015. Earlier in his career, he was a research scientist and earned a degree in materials science and engineering from UCLA.
S1 E148 · Sun, May 03, 2020
Reghu Thanumalayan of Deutsche Telekom Talks Hallo Magenta and Independent Voice Assistants
You know about Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Google Assistant. What about the German alternative from Deutsche Telekom, Hallo Magenta? You are going to learn a lot today from Reghu Thanumalayan, Innovation Lead for Deutsche Telekom’s Hallo Magenta Voice Assistant. He led the technology team that brought Magenta to market in 2019. Reghu shares insights about what Magenta does, how consumers are using the smart speaker today, the integration with Alexa, and even how it is enabling others to build their own enterprise assistants. We cover a lot of ground today. Before Telekom, Reghu was VP of software engineering at SAP for more than a decade.
S1 E147 · Mon, April 27, 2020
Ron Jaworski CEO of Trinity Audio on the Rise of Audio Content in the Voice Era
As we shift into an era of voice there is an open question about where we will get all that content required for audio responses to voice queries. Trinity Audio’s Ron Jaworski has a simple answer: convert millions of pages of website and other text content into audio instantly using text-to-speech. This is a really interesting and broader discussion than you might think. TTS on webpages is a gateway to several interesting integrations of voice with our visual digital world as it is today. Ron Jaworski is co-founder and CEO of Trinity Audio, a company determined in Ron’s words, to audiofy, the world wide web. They have an audio player you can install on your website that will make the content listenable using TTS. However, they go beyond this by understanding context and creating an approach for delivering more than just page content and increasing time on page. Prior to founding Trinity, he was CEO of Meme Global Media. Today we talk audio content, voice assistants, and the building blocks of a new tech platform.
S1 E146 · Sun, April 19, 2020
Jeferson Valadares CEO of Doppio Games Talks Voice Interactive Games
Many people have been stuck inside for the past several weeks and some are trying out voice games to pass the time or just explore the latest developments in voice-interactive entertainment. Two games that have gotten a good deal of attention are The Vortex and the 3% Challenge, both from Doppio Games. These offer different examples of how to implement a game strategy on the leading voice platforms and serve as a jumping-off point for the conversation today with Jeferson Valadares, the co-founder and CEO of Doppio Games. We discuss these games in depth, how they differ creatively and from a business model standpoint. We also talk about monetization strategies, how voice revenue models differ from mobile and other gaming platforms and much more. Jeferson brings a deep background in game development to Doppio. He is a member of the Board of Directors at Rovio Entertainment was formerly VP/GM of the BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment and also spent time at top tier game studios such as EA, BioWare, and Digital Chocolate.
S1 E145 · Sun, April 12, 2020
Vocalis Health CEO Tal Wenderow on Vocal Biomarkers, Healthcare, and Coronavirus
Tal Wanderow is CEO of Vocalis. He and host Bret Kinsella discuss the latest progress behind employing vocal biomarkers to evaluate health conditions and risks. We go into detail about the current work behind tools for diagnosing and monitoring COVID-19 patients. We even explore the ethics of what data patients should have a right to access. Vocalis Health is focused on using vocal biomarkers to identify the likelihood of hospitalization for a variety of conditions and have another product focused on respiratory disease detection and monitoring. Given that background, it’s not surprising that the company has taken a prominent role in the healthcare industry response to the coronavirus pandemic.
S1 E144 · Mon, April 06, 2020
Voice Assistant Adoption in the Car Data Review with Cerence CEO Sanjay Dhawan
The topic today is voice assistant adoption in the car. It is rising quickly according to data from a recent report by Voicebot. My guest to discuss the trends behind drivers and voice is Sanjay Dhawan of Cerence, the spin-out of Nuance Automotive that since last October has been an independent publicly-traded company. Cerence has voice technology in over 300 million automobiles on the road today. So, Sanjay and his team have a lot of insight into where the industry has been, where it is now and where it’s headed. You have a couple of options to follow along with this episode. First, there is a video of the interview with the charts available at Voicebot.ai/webinars. Second, you can download the full In-car Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption Report 2020 at no cost by going to Voicebot.ai/research.
S1 E143 · Sun, March 29, 2020
Meredith, Media, and Voice with Rachel Reed
Meredith is a media powerhouse that reaches over 180 million people with some of the top brands in publishing including People Magazine, Allrecipes, Entertainment Weekly, Travel + Leisure, Food and Wine, Instyle, Real Simple, Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens and dozens of other brands. In addition, Meredith operates 17 local television stations in 12 U.S. media markets. Meredith has invested in voice enabling several magazine titles and is expanding support for Amazon Alexa skills. In our conversation, we discuss Meredith’s Entertainment Weekly Alexa skill, the new Real Simple meditation skill, Allrecipes, corporate voice strategy, and more. My guest is Rachel Reed, Senior Innovation Manager at Meredith. Earlier in her career, Rachel was a marketing manager at Time Inc. and also worked at Pallisades Media Ventures, Burson Marsteller, and Johns Hopkins University.
S1 E142 · Sun, March 22, 2020
Coronavirus, Tech and Voice with Recode, CNET and Strategy Analytics
Pandemics have broad impact and the voice industry is no exception to the ripple effects of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Today's discussion focuses on the intersection of the tech and voice industries and the rise of coronavirus. Joining Bret Kinsella are three guests that are analyzing the coronavirus pandemic closely. Rani Molla is the lead data reporter for Recode and Vox where she writes about tech and how data sheds light on what is really going on. David Watkins is an expert in the global consumer electronics supply chain which includes coverage of many smart devices including smart speakers. Ben Fox Rubin is the lead reporter on Amazon for CNET and speaks to the recent surge in online orders and the company's plans to hire 100,000 new workers in the U.S. to meet demand.
S1 E141 · Thu, March 12, 2020
Coronavirus Impact on Voice Industry Events with Erickson and Metrock
Coronavirus COVID-19 is now officially a global pandemic but it has been impacting events where the voice industry has a prominent role for nearly a month. MWC, HIMSS, SXSW all canceled. What other events are likely to face a similar fate? How is the industry already adjusting to new challenges associated with large gatherings? Peter Erickson and Bradley Metrock run the largest and most popular events in catering to the voice industry globally. Erickson has already had two events canceled due to coronavirus but has online events already on the calendar that are getting a lot of attention. Metrock also had some online events planned but also has the Voice of the Car Summit planned for April. We discuss how the CEOs of Modev and Score Publishing view the current situation, how they are adjusting, and what it portends for the future. Enjoy this special edition of the Voicebot Podcast.
S1 E140 · Sat, March 07, 2020
Michal Stanislawek CEO of Utter One Shares His Journey on Voice Platforms with Media, Games, and Monetization
Michal Stanislawek has nearly 20 years of experience in broadcast and online media. He co-founded Utter One in 2019 and quickly launched one of the most popular games on Google Assistant in Poland. That along with another title launched in the fall of 2019 serve over 100k users per month. The team has also launched a media-oriented Alexa skill and has a new Bixby Capsule in certification. In addition to Utter One Michal is also head of product development at MediaATMOS supporting premium live broadcast video around the world. He was formerly vice president of broadcast platforms at Deluxe MediaCloud where he built an award-winning media asset management and orchestration platform. He has been awarded MVP by Microsoft for two years running. Michal earned a Masters degree in engineering from Lublin University of Technology. We discuss how he initially went to market with his voice games, what he learned, and how he is moving forward with advertising monetization and creating new voice interactive media experiences. And, we discuss the future of media in the voice era. Enjoy!
S1 E139 · Mon, March 02, 2020
Ben Sauer Talks Voice UX in Healthcare and Other Use Cases
Ben Sauer is a designer with deep experience as a practitioner, trainer, and theorist around conversational design. He recently left a role as a product and design leader at Babylon Health in the UK which has recently launched a chatbot that serves patients on behalf of the National Health Service. He has also been a trainer for O'Reilly events, is a frequent conference speaker, and has worked with BBC, Pearson, and Tesco in their conversational design initiatives. He has a degree in English Literature from the University of Warwick. We discuss conversational design in healthcare and for other applications, what he has learned, and how voice is changing the way people are thinking about brand trust.
S1 E138 · Mon, February 24, 2020
Chris Sheldrick CEO of What3Words - Voicebot Podcast Ep 138
What3Words is a global address system that has assigned three-word labels to all of the 57 million 3-meter squares that make up the surface of the earth. That approach enables you to go to the front door of house, the side door of an office building, the middle of city block, a specific tree in a park, or even a remote jungle location. It offers precision in space that is far superior to our postal address system and is more accessible than GPS coordinates. Chris Sheldrick, CEO and co-founder of What3Words, discusses the origin behind the solution, his work in the automotive, transportation, and government sectors and how the approach aligns well with the rise of voice assistants.
S1 E137 · Sun, February 16, 2020
David Cannington Co-founder of Nuheara on Shaping the Hearables Market
David Cannington is co-founder of Nuheara, a pioneer in the hearables, wireless earbuds market. Nuheara was founded in 2015 in Perth, Australia and delivered its first product in 2017. The company recently announced a new generation product at CES, the IQ Buds Max. David and his co-founder previously worked together at Sensear which provided noise reduction gear for high noise manufacturing environments.
S1 E136 · Sun, February 09, 2020
Voice UX Today with Cathy Pearl of Google and Adva Levin from Pretzel Labs
My two guests today are widely sought after experts in voice user experience design. After more than 20 years designing voice user interfaces, Cathy Pearl is well known in the industry and is the author of what many people see as the key handbook for voice application design, "Designing Voice User Interfaces." Cathy currently serves as head of Conversation Design Outreach at Google. Prior to Google, Cathy was vice president of user experience at Sensely and before that worked at Nuance, Tellme, and Volio. She holds degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science and worked for NASA early in her career. Adva Levin is founder of Pretzel Labs, an award-winning voice interaction studio best known for winning the top prize in the Alexa skills competition for Kids skills in 2018. Other popular titles by Pretzel labs include Freeze Dancers and Kids Bop Daily. Pretzel Labs also works with brands, media companies and government ministries on voice user experience design. Adva is an Alexa Champion, has undergraduate degrees in Math and Economics, and a Masters in Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University. Adva first joined me on Voicebot Podcast back in Episode 49 in June 2018 and Cathy preceded here by a few months in Episode 30 two years ago this month.
S1 E135 · Sun, February 02, 2020
Voice Assistants in Healthcare with Nate Treloar and Teri Fisher
Today, we have an in-depth discussion about voice technology adoption in healthcare, what some trials of new applications are showing, and where we are headed. Dr. Teri Fisher of VoiceFirst Health and the Alexa in Canada podcasts is currently a full-time Sports and Exercise Physician and clinical assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia. In addition to his clinical medical practice, Dr. Fisher has become a leading authority on the intersection of healthcare and voice technology. Also with us is Nate Treloar, co-founder and chief operating officer of Orbita, a software company focused on bringing voice assistants into patient-facing use cases. Nate is a respected expert and speaker on search, text, and data mining and has advised many of the world’s largest companies and government agencies. His work at Orbita takes him into leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic and many others to support patient use cases before care, during care, and post-procedure. This interview was recorded onsite at Project Voice in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
S1 E134 · Sun, January 26, 2020
The NFL and Voice with Ian Campbell and John Gillilan
The National Football League (NFL) in the U.S. is the top sports league by revenue globally. It is also a media powerhouse that has been experimenting with voice assistant technology to enhance the fan experience. Joining Voicebot Podcast host Bret Kinsella today is Ian Campbell from NFL Labs, the innovation arm of the NFL. He has worked in product design, UX and innovation for the past two years in his second tour with the NFL. Earlier in his career, Ian was director of creative and UX for NFL.com and the various football and fantasy football mobile apps of the league. He has also worked previously at Phenomenon, DeviantArt, GolinHarris, and Digitas. Also joining us is John Gillilan, founder of Bondad.fm, who has been working with the NFL on its voice initiatives. John is a creative voice designer and Alexa Champion that previously worked at Disney, Maker Studios, and KUFALA Recordings. He was also co-founder of Vosotros, an independent music distribution company where he executive produced 10 albums with 100+ musicians. Ian and John walked through an interesting presentation at Project Voice where they went through the backstory behind The Rookie’s Guide to the NFL Alexa skill and Flash Briefing. They also discussed the overall strategy and design considerations as well as some projects that are not yet public but are available today to NFL employees. We discuss a wide range of topics including the use of avatars, multimodal design and how to think about mobile devices differently that smart speakers and smart displays. Enjoyl
S1 E133 · Mon, January 20, 2020
Mayo Clinic Discusses Voice Initiatives for Healthcare
Healthcare will be a big adopter of voice technology and voice assistants. Mayo Clinic is out front innovating around new and intriguing use cases which we discuss in today's show. Dr. Sandhya Pruthi is a physician at Mayo Clinic focused on breast cancer treatment and research and a frequent speaker on voice technology. She is the current president and board of trustees member of the National Consortium of breast centers among several other industry recognitions. Joyce Even is Vice Chair of Global Business Solutions, Content Management and Delivery at Mayo Clinic where she oversees a variety of initiatives related to medical and health content dissemination as part of the Clinic’s mission to serve its local and global communities. Joyce is a CPA with a background in accounting, an MBA, and also holds a degree in Nursing.
S1 E132 · Mon, January 13, 2020
CES 2020 Interviews with Audioburst, Nuheara, NPR and More
We have 10 interviews from the floor of CES 2020 offering the latest insights on voice assistants, voice services, and what to expect over the next year. Gal Klein, CTO and co-founder of Audioburst (4:28) Audrey Arbeeney, founder and CEO of Audiobrain (11:50) Pat Higbie CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia (22:01) Tobias Dengel CEO of WillowTree (28:30) Dr. Martyn Farrow, COO of Soapbox Labs (37:40) Nithya Thadani, CEO of RAIN (44:18) Joel Sucherman from NPR (52:46) David Cannington, co-founder of Nuheara (1:02:50) Jonathan Bradley, from Kohler (1:10:51) Robert Keating Safe-Tec (1:14:31)
S1 E131 · Mon, January 06, 2020
2020 Voice AI Predictions Part 2 on Voice App Architecture with Kelvie, McElreath and Ream
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!
S1 E130 · Sat, January 04, 2020
2020 Voice AI Predictions Part 1 with Ware, Bass, and Lens-FitzGerald
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!
S1 E129 · Fri, December 27, 2019
Patricia Scanlon CEO of Soapbox Labs
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.
S1 E128 · Sun, December 22, 2019
2019 Voice Year in Review with Jargon, Voxly, and Voicebot
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.
S1 E127 · Mon, December 16, 2019
Hearables and Voice with Dave Kemp and Andy Bellavia
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.
S1 E126 · Mon, December 09, 2019
The Privacy and Security Episode with Molla, Mozer and Lens-FitzGerald
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.
S1 E125 · Sun, December 01, 2019
Jeff McMahon Voicify CEO on Voice and the Martech Stack
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.
S1 E124 · Sun, November 24, 2019
Tom Hewitson CEO of Labworks Shares 10 Hot Takes from 2.5 Years in Voice
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.
S1 E123 · Sun, November 17, 2019
Samsung Bixby Developers from Home Advisor, Baby Stats, Dilli Labs, and Volley
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.
S1 E122 · Mon, November 11, 2019
The ConverCon Interviews with SoundHound, Soapbox Labs, Algolia, and Webio
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.
S1 E121 · Sun, November 03, 2019
Larry Heck CEO of Viv Labs and SVP at Samsung Talks Bixby and 30 Years in Voice - Voicebot Podcast Ep 121
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.
S1 E120 · Sun, October 27, 2019
Sanjay Dhawan CEO of Cerence Talks About Voice and AI in the Car
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.
S1 E119 · Sat, October 19, 2019
Voice Landscape in Europe from All About Voice Conference
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
S1 E118 · Sat, October 12, 2019
Enterprise Voice Assistant Adoption and Org Structure with Nestle, RBC, and American Red Cross
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.
S1 E117 · Mon, October 07, 2019
Financial Services and Voice AI with Prudential, Visa and TD Ameritrade from Voice Summit
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.
S1 E116 · Sat, September 28, 2019
Amazon Alexa Product Launch Event Commentary from Amazon's Daniel Rausch, USA Today, The Spoon, CNET, and Voicebot
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.
S1 E115 · Sun, September 22, 2019
Chris Mitchell CEO of Audio Analytic
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.
S1 E114 · Fri, September 13, 2019
10 Voice Technology Applications That are Not Alexa and Friends with Jeff Adams CEO of Cobalt
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
S1 E113 · Sun, September 08, 2019
Gene Munster Founder of Loup Ventures Talks Voice SEO, Smart Speaker Sales, and Apple
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.
S1 E112 · Sun, September 01, 2019
Braden Ream CEO of Voiceflow
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.
S1 E111 · Fri, August 23, 2019
Podcasts and Voice Assistants Interviews with Google, Edison Research, Westwood One, Spoken Layer, Amplifi and Witlingo
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.
S1 E110 · Mon, August 19, 2019
Dave Isbitski of Amazon Talks About the Early Days of Alexa
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.
S1 E109 · Mon, August 12, 2019
Adam Cheyer of Samsung and Viv Labs Talks 25 Years of Voice Assistants
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.
S1 E108 · Sat, August 03, 2019
Marketer Adoption of Voice Apps as a Marketing Channel
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.
S1 E107 · Sun, July 28, 2019
Voice Summit 19 Onsite Interviews with Audioburst, AgVoice, Dabble Labs, XAPPmedia, Videmme, and Nodes
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.
S1 E106 · Sun, July 21, 2019
Voice Assistant SEO for Brands with Ben Fisher and Ava Mutchler
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.
S1 E105 · Sun, July 14, 2019
Amy Stapleton, Dave Kemp, and Pete Haas Discuss First 100 Episodes
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.
S1 E104 · Fri, July 05, 2019
Top Voice News of First Half of 2019 with Ben Fox Rubin, Pete Erickson, and Eric Schwartz
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.
S1 E103 · Sun, June 30, 2019
NYC AI, Bots and Marketing Meetup with Betaworks, Skilled Creative, Vayner Media, and Resemble AI
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.
S1 E102 · Fri, June 21, 2019
Rupal Patel CEO of VocaliD Discusses Customized Synthetic Voices
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.
S1 E101 · Mon, June 17, 2019
The Re MARS Interviews with Pulse Labs, Volley, The Cube, Reuters, Bondad, and Philosophical Creations
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.
S1 E100 · Sun, June 09, 2019
Audrey Arbeeny of Audiobrain Talks Sonic Branding and the Rise of Voice
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.
S1 E99 · Fri, May 31, 2019
Margaret Mayer VP of Conversational AI at Capital One Talks Voice Assistants, Alexa, and Eno
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.
S1 E98 · Sun, May 26, 2019
Marco Iacono COO of Viv and VP of Mobile R&D for Samsung Bixby Talks Voice Assistant Design and Launch
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.
S1 E97 · Mon, May 20, 2019
Amir Hirsh CEO of Audioburst Discusses Audio Content Search and Discovery
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.
S1 E96 · Sun, May 12, 2019
Four Developers React to Google IO 2019 Announcements
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.
S1 E95 · Sun, May 05, 2019
Dave Isbitski Amazon Chief Evangelist for Alexa Talks Voice Adoption
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.
S1 E94 · Sun, April 28, 2019
Ron Croen, Founding CEO of Nuance and Partner at You and Mr. Jones Brandtech Ventures
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.
S1 E93 · Sat, April 20, 2019
Voice in the Car Part 2 with John Foster of Aiqudo, Rachel Battish of Audioburst, and Fred Jacobs of Jacobs Media
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.
S1 E92 · Sat, April 13, 2019
Voice Assistants in the Car with Amazon Alexa, Nuance Automotive, and Harman
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.
S1 E91 · Mon, April 08, 2019
Smart Speaker Adoption Data for Australia with Matt Ware and Lachlan Pottenger of First and Ava Mutchler
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.
S1 E90 · Mon, April 01, 2019
Steven Arkonovich Creator of Big Sky on Alexa
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.
S1 E89 · Mon, March 25, 2019
Tom Livne CEO of Verbit Talks Voice and Transcription
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.
S1 E88 · Sun, March 17, 2019
US Smart Speaker Adoption Trends with Jeff McMahon, Jason Fields and Ava Mutchler
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.
S1 E87 · Mon, March 11, 2019
Mark Lippett CEO of XMOS on the Chips that Make Voice Assistants Work
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.
S1 E86 · Fri, March 01, 2019
Vijay Balasubramaniyan CEO of Pindrop Security
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.
S1 E85 · Mon, February 25, 2019
Matt Ware and Lachlan Pottenger of First Talk Voice Shopping in Australia
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.
S1 E84 · Mon, February 18, 2019
Amy Stapleton CEO of Tellables Talks Voice Interactive Stories
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.
S1 E83 · Sun, February 10, 2019
Ben Fisher CEO of Magic and Co Talks Voice and Brands
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.
S1 E82 · Sun, February 03, 2019
Voice Assistant Use in the Car with Metrock, Vuori, and Mutchler
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.
S1 E81 · Mon, January 28, 2019
Niko Vuori CEO of Drivetime.fm Talks Voice Games for the Car
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.
S1 E80 · Mon, January 21, 2019
Brian Roemmele Talks About The Last Interface and Intelligence Amplifier
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.
S1 E79 · Mon, January 14, 2019
CES 2019 Interviews with Google, Samsung, Nuance, Alibaba and More
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.
S1 E78 · Tue, January 08, 2019
CES 2019 - Eight Interviews with Voice Innovators
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.
S1 E77 · Sat, January 05, 2019
Paul Cutsinger of the Amazon Alexa Team
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.
S1 E76 · Mon, December 31, 2018
Zach Johnson CEO of Xandra a Conversational Design Studio
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.
S1 E75 · Mon, December 24, 2018
Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner of 169 Labs Discuss Voice Adoption in Europe
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.
S1 E74 · Sun, December 16, 2018
Voice Assistant Year in Review with Bouzid, Hewitson and Kaushansky
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.
S1 E73 · Sun, December 09, 2018
Voice Assistant Adoption Beyond the Smart Speaker with Oren Jacob and Greg Hedges
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.
S1 E72 · Sun, December 02, 2018
Stuart Patterson CEO of LifePod Talks Proactive Voice and Assistants for Elders
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.
S1 E71 · Fri, November 23, 2018
Nic Newman on Voice Assistant Adoption and the Media
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.
S1 E70 · Mon, November 19, 2018
Bixby from a Developer Perspective with Murphy, Kibbe and Haas
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.
S1 E69 · Sun, November 11, 2018
Adam Cheyer Co-Founder of Siri and Viv and Engineering Lead for Samsung Bixby
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.
S1 E68 · Mon, November 05, 2018
Heidi Culbertson CEO of Marvee on Voice and the Elder Community
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.
S1 E67 · Mon, October 29, 2018
Rishad Tobaccowala, Publicis Chief Growth Officer Talks Voice and Brands
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.
S1 E66 · Mon, October 22, 2018
Voice UX Best Practices with Emerson Sklar of Applause
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.
S1 E65 · Sun, October 14, 2018
Bill Cava Co-Founder of Orbita Talks Voice and Healthcare
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.
S1 E64 · Mon, October 08, 2018
Alexa Accelerator Interviews Class of 2018 (Jargon, Helix AI, Presence AI)
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.
S1 E63 · Mon, October 01, 2018
Doug Schumacher Founder of Arrovox and the Voice Marketing Podcast
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.
S1 E62 · Mon, September 24, 2018
Alexa Product Launch Event with Graham (USA Today), Jurran (C'T) and Dastin (Reuters)
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.
S1 E61 · Sun, September 16, 2018
Omar Tawakol CEO of Voicera on Creating a Conversations Inbox
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.
S1 E60 · Sun, September 09, 2018
Adam Marchick CEO of Alpine AI Discusses Headspace Acquisition
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.
S1 E59 · Sun, September 02, 2018
Jeff Adams CEO of Cobalt and Former Alexa Team Lead
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.
S1 E58 · Mon, August 27, 2018
Nick Schwab of Invoked Apps Talks Alexa Skill Product Strategy
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.
S1 E57 · Mon, August 20, 2018
Jess Williams of Opearlo Talks Consumer Alexa Skill Discovery Strategies
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.
S1 E56 · Sun, August 12, 2018
Jan König Discusses the Jovo Open Source Framework for Voice App Development
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.
S1 E55 · Sun, August 05, 2018
John Kelvie CEO of Bespoken Discusses How Voice App Testing is Different
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.
S1 E54 · Mon, July 30, 2018
Shane Mac CEO of Assist Says The Talking Internet is Here
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!
S1 E53 · Mon, July 23, 2018
Tom Hebner Global Innovation Head for Nuance Talks 20 Years in Voice
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.
S1 E52 · Sun, July 15, 2018
Pulse Labs Founders Talk Voice App Testing and Alexa Accelerator
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.
S1 E51 · Mon, July 09, 2018
Rand Hindi CEO of Snips Talks Independent Voice Assistants, Privacy, Block Chain and ICO
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.
S1 E50 · Fri, June 29, 2018
Voice Shopping Panel - Brian Colcord and Ryan MacInnis of Voysis plus Kinsella and Mutchler
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.
S1 E49 · Sun, June 24, 2018
Adva Levin Founder of Pretzel Labs Talks Voice-First Games
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.
S1 E48 · Sun, June 17, 2018
Mycroft AI CEO Joshua Montgomery Talks Open Source Voice Assistant
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.
S1 E47 · Sun, June 10, 2018
Voice AI First Half 2018 Review - All Star Panel with Tobias Goebel, Pat Higbie, Chris Messina, Ava Mutchler and Bret Kinsella
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.
S1 E46 · Sun, June 03, 2018
Novel Effect Founders Use Voice and Sound to Enhance Story Time and More
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.
S1 E45 · Sun, May 27, 2018
Noelle LaCharite of Microsoft Cognitive Services Talks AI and Building Voice Models and Voice Apps
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.
S1 E44 · Mon, May 21, 2018
Voice SEO Explained by Stone Temple CEO Eric Enge
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.
S1 E43 · Mon, May 14, 2018
Google Assistant Developer Panel, Jochen Emig CTO Onsei and Michael Myers CPO XAPmedia
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.
S1 E42 · Thu, May 10, 2018
John Foster, CEO of Aiqudo, Talks Voice Enabling Mobile Apps
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.
S1 E41 · Thu, May 03, 2018
SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer Discusses the Hound Voice Assistant and $100 Million Funding Round
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.
S1 E40 · Mon, April 30, 2018
The Elements of Multi-Modal Design with Karen Kaushansky
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.
S1 E39 · Sun, April 22, 2018
Alexa Developer Panel with Octavio Menocal and Eric Olson
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.
S1 E38 · Mon, April 16, 2018
Chris Messina Founder of Molly Talks Personalized Virtual Assistants
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.
S1 E37 · Mon, April 09, 2018
Vasili Shynkarenka, CEO of Storyline, is Making Alexa Skill Development So Easy, Anyone Can Do It
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.
S1 E36 · Mon, April 02, 2018
Volley Founders Max Child and James Wilsterman Talk Voice 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.
S1 E35 · Sun, March 25, 2018
Stas Tushinskiy CEO Instreamatic Talks Ad Monetization for Voice
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.
S1 E34 · Sun, March 18, 2018
Smart Speaker Adoption Data Review, PullString and RAIN Weigh In
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.
S1 E33 · Mon, March 12, 2018
Mark Webster CEO Sayspring Discusses Voice App Prototyping Tools and Best Practices
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.
S1 E32 · Mon, March 05, 2018
Dr. Ahmed Bouzid - CEO of Witlingo and Former Product Leader for Amazon Alexa and Angle.com
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.
S1 E31 · Sun, February 25, 2018
Mark Beccue (Principle Analyst at Tractica) Talks AI / Digital Assistant Software Market Size and Growth Trends
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.
S1 E30 · Mon, February 19, 2018
Cathy Pearl Author of Designing Voice User Interfaces and VP at Sensely
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.
S1 E29 · Mon, February 12, 2018
Tobias Goebel of Aspect Software Talks Computational Linguistics, Chatbots and Voice Assistants
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.
S1 E28 · Mon, February 05, 2018
Tim McElreath of Scripps (Food Network) Talks Multimodal Design
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.
S1 E27 · Mon, January 29, 2018
Steven Hansen, CTO RAIN Agency, Offers Insights from 30 Alexa Skills for Brands, Movies and Insurers
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.
S1 E26 · Mon, January 22, 2018
All About Bot Analytics with Dashbot CEO Arte Merritt
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.
S1 E25 · Mon, January 15, 2018
CES 2018 Recap with All-Star Panel Arte Merritt (Dashbot), Stas Tushinskiy (Instreamatic), David Watkins (Strategy Analytics)
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.
S1 E24 · Tue, January 09, 2018
Voicebot Podcast Episode 24 - Todd Mozer CEO Sensory Discusses Neural Networks and Two Decades of Voice Innovation
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.
S1 E23 · Mon, January 01, 2018
Owen Brown CTO of Starbutter Talks Monetization and Why Google and Facebook Will Win in Voice
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.
S1 E22 · Tue, December 26, 2017
2017 Voice Assistant Year in Review
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.
S1 E21 · Mon, December 18, 2017
Oren Jacob, CEO Pullstring Reveals How 20 Years at Pixar Influences His Approach to Voice Apps
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.
S1 E20 · Mon, December 11, 2017
Derrick Fountain - TRT World News Media and Voice AI from Turkey
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.
S1 E19 · Sun, December 03, 2017
Voicebot Podcast Episode 19 - Matt Hartman, Partner at Betaworks, Investing in Voice Tech
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.
S1 E18 · Mon, November 27, 2017
Shane Mac CEO Assist - Conversational Platform for Brands
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.
S1 E17 · Mon, November 20, 2017
Peter Nann, Voice UX Expert from Australia's Salmat
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.
S1 E16 · Mon, November 13, 2017
David Watkins of Strategy Analytics, Global Smart Speaker Adoption Data
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.
S1 E15 · Mon, November 06, 2017
Hicham Tahiri, CEO Smartly.ai, Live from France
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.
S1 E14 · Tue, October 31, 2017
Brad Abrams, Google Assistant Group Product Manager
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.
S1 E13 · Mon, October 23, 2017
Jan König, CEO of Jovo Talks Multi-Modal Voice Apps Across Surfaces
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.
S1 E12 · Mon, October 16, 2017
Interview with David Beisel of NextView Ventures on Super Technologies, AI and Voice Assistants
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.
S1 E11 · Mon, October 09, 2017
Pat Higbie XAPPmedia CEO - Interactive Voice for Brands & Media at Scale
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.
S1 E10 · Mon, October 02, 2017
Peter Cahill CEO of Voysis, an Independent Speech Technology 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.
S1 E9 · Mon, September 25, 2017
Leading Amazon Alexa Game Developer Jo Jaquinta
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.
S1 E8 · Mon, September 18, 2017
Bryan Moffett of National Public Media / NPR
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.
S1 E7 · Mon, September 11, 2017
Life Bot Founders Jess Williams and Oscar Merry Talk Alexa and Google Assistant for Brands and Consumers
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.
S1 E6 · Mon, September 04, 2017
John Kelvie of Bespoken, Software for Voice Application Diagnostics
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.
S1 E5 · Mon, August 28, 2017
Dan Whaley Demonstrates UK Alexa Skills to Illustrate Voice UX Design Prinicples
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.
S1 E4 · Wed, August 23, 2017
Alexa Developer and Author Quentin Delaoutre
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.
S1 E3 · Mon, August 14, 2017
Voice User Experience Design Interview with Lisa Falkson
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!
S1 E2 · Tue, August 08, 2017
Voicebot Podcast Episode 2 - Independent Developer, Nick Schwab
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.
Sun, July 23, 2017
Voicebot Podcast Episode 1 - The Upstart, SoundHound
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.
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