James Poulter is the CEO & Co-founder of Vixen Labs, a Voice first consultancy and Founder of the UK's leading Voice & Conversational Ai Community - Voice2.io

We discussed:

• All things voice and smart assistants in the house, car and office
• 23M smart speaker sales expected in Europe - 58% growth
• Market Share  - 45% Google, 41% Alexa, 13% Other
• The future of voice SEO, voice advertising and voice commerce
• How to build and monetise skills
• 60k skills now available in the US & 30k in the UK
• Alexa now speaks Hindi
• Baidu's Xiaodu Smart Speaker available on 400m devices.
• Audio Analytic "The Shazam of Sound" raises $12m
• Nike & Google partner on 'Ask Nike' for voice commerce.

James is also flying out to NY next week to the Voice Summit - https://www.voicesummit.ai/ - in Newark, NY where 5000 attendees will hear from 350 speakers.   The keynote speaker is Dave Isbitski the Alexa, Chief Evangelist who was on the show a few weeks ago. https://samtalks.tech/dave-isbitski-alexa-chief-evangelist   Background: James has spearheaded a number of international conversational products including the first Alexa Skills and Google Actions, as well as the award winning chat bots programmes at The LEGO Group in his previous role as Head of The LEGO Group's Emerging Platforms & Partnerships.   James has a decade of experience in audio production and podcasting within agencies, independent projects and commercial ventures and has a passion for the power of the spoken word and the audio medium to create empathy, drive brand awareness and create immersive experiences.   Prior to joining LEGO, James worked for a number of the world's leading marketing, advertising and public relations firms including Edelman and Ogilvy leading digital marketing, mobile and social campaigns both in EMEA and globally as well as new business efforts for clients such as Diageo, Unilever, Bose, PayPal, HP and Adobe.   Outside of work James is an advisor to the Church of England's digital board as well as well as a number of other charities, entrepreneurs and startups. James is also the host of the show "Signal" for Christians In Media which explores on a monthly basis the intersection between faith, media and technology.   James can be found on all good social media as @jamespoulter.