Machine Yearning

You wouldn’t think paper guidebooks, the repositioning of a travel brand and the future of digital creative agencies would be Machine Yearning territory.

But they are - when the meeting point is Daniel Houghton.

Daniel is the CEO of Pyxl (that’s P-Y-X-L,) a Nashville-based digital marketing agency. For years, Daniel has operated right up at the edge of digital content design, build and measurement. Before joining Pyxl this year, Daniel was CEO of Lonely Planet. Under his leadership, Lonely Planet made Fast Company’s 2018 "Most Innovative Companies" List and he was a 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30.

Now, Daniel is on the agency side with PYXL and diving in to a new set of challenges as a leader, digital strategist and student of culture. When Shane from Assist sat down with Daniel, the news of his job move had just broken and this was his first interview as PYXL CEO.

This is Machine Yearning, though, so this isn’t the typical arms-crossed-looking-manly-on-the-magazine-cover CEO interview.

Hang out and enjoy.

You wouldn’t think paper guidebooks, the repositioning of a travel brand and the future of digital creative agencies would be Machine Yearning territory.

But they are - when the meeting point is Daniel Houghton.

Daniel is the CEO of Pyxl (that’s P-Y-X-L,) a Nashville-based digital marketing agency. For years, Daniel has operated right up at the edge of digital content design, build and measurement. Before joining Pyxl this year, Daniel was CEO of Lonely Planet. Under his leadership, Lonely Planet made Fast Company’s 2018 "Most Innovative Companies" List and he was a 2017 Forbes 30 Under 30.

Now, Daniel is on the agency side with PYXL and diving in to a new set of challenges as a leader, digital strategist and student of culture. When Shane from Assist sat down with Daniel, the news of his job move had just broken and this was his first interview as PYXL CEO.

This is Machine Yearning, though, so this isn’t the typical arms-crossed-looking-manly-on-the-magazine-cover CEO interview.

Hang out and enjoy.

Today, an episode so packed with so many amazing folks, four of them, in fact, that we can’t wait to dive right in. But first, some quick scene setting.

A few weeks back, your humble pod accepted the invitation from the team at MODEV and attended The Voice Summit. It brought together over 2,000 people working at the front edge of voice, AI, Natural Language Processing, and conversational commerce. We hope there’s a Voice Summit 2019 because we were able to sit down with too many brilliant people.

First up, Patricia Scanlon on the trust, and data, needed to create voice recognition for children. Then Adva Levin lays out persona, gaming and behavior hurdles when building skills for kids. Bree Glaeser talks about finding natural language through research and the challenges brands will have in the voice future. Last, but by no stretch of the imagination least, Cathy Pearl discusses her experience with Actions on Google, disambiguation and the social nature of voice assistants. 

So what are you waiting for? Hit play!

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Patricia Scanlon at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Patricia is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design.

Patricia is the founder and CEO of SoapBox Labs and a pioneer in children’s speech recognition. Patricia and her Dublin-based team are deploying deep learning to build mammoth data sets of children’s voices so they have the opportunity to enter the world of voice-activated technology.  

This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Adva Levin at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Adva is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design.

Adva is a pioneer in voice-driven, children’s game development. Her shop, Pretzel Labs, creates voice-first games like Kids Court, where an Alexa based judge settles kids’ fights. Kids Court won the grand prize in the Alexa kid skill challenge. Adva is pushing out into new territory where we see how empathic, useful products can be educational, reduce screen time and, according to the users we’ve polled, be damn fun, too.

This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Bree Glaeser at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Bree is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design.

Bree is from The MARS Agency, where she’s leveraged her formal training as field researcher at Harvard Medical School and Parsons into the world of consumer insights and strategic global marketing. She’s helped to build voice assistants that help people navigate brick and mortar stores and it’s clear her thousands of hours of field work have paid off.  

This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Google’s Cathy Pearl at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Cathy is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design.

At Google, Cathy is helping people and brands figure out how to integrate voice assistants into their larger strategies. She has the perspective that only comes after you’ve worked your way through an incredibly diverse swath of projects, user needs and clients. She’s done voice assistants for auto, health care, and even fashion advice and got us to think in new ways about the social nature of voice assistants.

This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.

Bias in our culture and in our technology, particularly in AI, is a mammoth issue. For those of you in the Machine Yearning faithful, you’ve probably noticed that we have a point of view about it here at the pod. If you hadn’t noticed, last week’s episode with Janeen Uzell and this week’s will make out position quite clear. We think being intentional, breaking bad hiring and management habits, and building inclusive teams is the only way the voice and AI space can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

This episode, we have three guests who provide guidance on how we can do that as we return to the VOICE Summit. Again - shout out to the MODEV team, the conference producers, for taking great care of us. Our guests are from the agency and user experience design world and each of them, in different ways, talk about how to make the most of this moment in time. And how the emerging voice space could blow it.

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Will Hall at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Will is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design. Will is the Chief Creative Officer at the RAIN Agency. In this excerpt, he lays out how brands need to evolve and work in smart, new ways to own their brand voice so they move beyond recommendation and into anticipation. This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.

This chapter is an excerpt from our interview with Josef Hapli at the 2018 VOICE Summit - the largest gathering of the conversational technology world. Josef is one of the many folks we interviewed, people who are thriving at the front edge of brand, UX, research and design. Josef is the founder and CEO of Ether - a DC-centered creative agency. In this excerpt, Josef lays out the flares for why brands who play it safe in the age of voice are courting irrelevance.  This is just a taste, so make sure you grab the full episode and subscribe so you never miss a single Machine Yearning.