Sam Talks Technology

Sam Sethi talked with Hannah Power about what is personal branding and do we all need it?

How do we go about achieving it using the 6 step process to build a personal brand?

• Clarity
• Customer
• Communication
• Content
• Channels
• Connect
• Collateral

Sam Sethi talked with Charles Cadbury about the development of their Alexa skill but also we talked about other Alexa features such In-Skill Purchasing (ISP), Alexa Presentation Language (APL) and name skill intent along with the challenges of internationalisation, privacy, voice SEO and developer skill monetisation.

'Book it Now' allows users to search for and book recommended local services using only their voice.

Our vision is to enable thousands of local businesses to be bookable via Alexa, which will be available for people to use wherever they are. - Charlie Cadbury

Launched by Amazon in 2019 the annual Alexa Cup is a global competition designed to encourage the development of Alexa Skills (voice apps) that solve real-world problems in a way that enhances customer experience while also being commercially viable.

Sam Sethi talked with Jamie Riddell about some of his recent investments in startups and his personal goals, as well as how he sees the future of technology evolving from online advertising through to new digital currencies like Facebook's Libra.

Sam Sethi talked with Alan Watkins about the future of work, the future of leadership, the future of economics & politics as well as the future of democracy.

We also talked about Alan’s next three books, his three degrees and his work with the Olympic teams.

Sam Sethi talked with Tiffany St James about digital transformation, open data in government and her new side project the Consultancy Club.

Sam Sethi talked with James Poulter about: Voice Commerce, Voice SEO, Internationalisation and Creating & Branding Alexa Voice Skills.

Sam Sethi talked with Katie King about her role as a member of the UK Government All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) task force for the enterprise adoption of AI.

We further discussed the role of the UK's Office for AI which was headed up by Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright but is now run by Baroness Nicky Morgan the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.

We then talked about Katie's on-going work in schools and universities trying to get them to adopt AI courses.

Finally we talked about the potential future role of AI and algorithms to create a UK social score similar to the one being rolled out in China. Was it a good or bad thing? We already have a financial score so what's to stop us having a social score to nudge and correct our bad behaviours and to encourage good behaviour.

Sam Sethi talked with Sam Liang about his entrepreneurial journey, from his beginnings as a computer student at Peking University through to a software engineer at Google where he was responsible for developing the blue dot on Google Maps.

Sam sold his first startup, a location platform called Alohar Mobile to Alibaba, before finally starting Otter, the 30-person startup team that hails from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo, as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge.

Otter was founded, just over three years ago and has raised $13 million in funding from the who’s who of Silicon Valley. e.g Horizons Ventures – a backer of Viv, DeepMind, Siri, Slack and others – who led the $10 million Series A. Also participating were Bridgewater Associates, i-Hatch Ventures, MetaLab, Jay Markley, and Boston investors Jim Pallotta and Stu Porter.

Seed investors included Tim Draper through Draper Associates and Draper Dragon; Dave Morin through Slow Ventures; David Cheriton "The billionaire Professor and 1st investor in Google"; SV Tech Ventures, Danhua Capital, and 500 Startups.

Otter wants to make it as easy to search your voice conversations as it is to search your email and texts. The idea to create a new voice assistant focused on transcribing everyday conversations – like meetings and interviews.

Essentially, a voice recorder that offers automatic transcription, Otter is designed to be able to understand and capture long-form conversations that take place between multiple people.

This is a different sort of voice technology than what’s been developed today for voice assistance – as with Alexa or Google Assistant.

The existing technologies are not good enough for human-to-human conversations,” explains Sam Liang.

“Google’s voice API has been trained to optimize voice search,” he says, adding that when people talk to voice assistants, it’s typically only one person talking and they tend to speak more slowly and clearly than usual.

They also often ask shorter questions, like “what’s the weather?,” not carry on long conversations.

“Human meetings are much more complicated, it usually involves at least two people, and the people could talk for an hour. It’s a long-form conversation.”

With Otter, the goal is to capture those conversations – meetings, interviews, lectures, etc. – and turn them into a searchable archive where everything said is immediately transcribed by Otter's software.

The entire technology stack, including speech recognition, was built in-house. The company is not using existing speech recognition APIs, because they wanted to improve the accuracy, and optimize for multiple speakers, says Liang.

To identify when someone else starts talking, Otter uses a technology called diarization to separate each individual speaker; it then generates a voice print for each person’s voice.

Broadly speaking, this is like the voice equivalent to facial recognition, with the voice print being used to identify the speaker going forward.

Sam envisions a number of potential use cases for Otter's technology, including in ente

Sam Sethi talked with David Terrar about the changes in the IT industry over the last 40 years and how his first job offer from IBM was delivered by an old-fashioned telegram! Yes there was no email in 1978.

We talked about the many changes he has seen from his early days at IBM with mainframes and learning programming languages such as Fortran through to today's newer technologies such as blockchain.

Dave talked about why he believes 2007 was a significant milestone year for technology with the combined introduction/adoption of cloud computing, social media and mobile phones.

We ended up talking about how 2020 will be the next critical key technology year with the introduction/adoption of 5G, AI, Blockchain, IPFS & Smart Contracts aka it's the dawn of the Web 3.0 era.