VUX World

Tom Hewitson, Founder and CEO, Labworks.io, joins us to share how he built a business on Alexa and Google Assistant, how he finds, keeps hold and monetises users, design best practice and advice for those looking to do the same.

In 2017 and 2018, when Amazon Alexa began rolling our in-skill purchasing (ISP), many thought that there'd be a gold rush on the Alexa platform. 

Business will be built, money will be made and all will be well. It happened with the App Store on mobile, after all.

There was two problem that most developers were facing: how do you create something that's good enough to keep users coming back for more, and then how do you create an offer for those users that's worth paying for?

Those challenges turned out to be pretty difficult to overcome and, to date, only three companies have managed to reach the levels of success many were aiming for in the Alexa space: Matchbox, with their suite of quizzes and kids games, Invoked apps with it's load of sleep and ambient sounds and, our guest this week, Labworks, with Voice Arcade.

One weekend, wanting to explore Alexa for investigatory purposes, in case any clients were to ask about it in future, Tom Hewiston, founder of then-chatbot agency, Labworks, set about building a game.

After launching the game and pretty much forgetting about it, some months later, Tom received a call from Amazon. Turns out, Tom's game was the third most popular game on the Alexa platform. Amazon were starting to pay developers for having popular skills as an incentive for them to continue improving skills and developing new skills.

These rewards were enough for Tom to employ someone to help build out more games. Labworks pivoted from building chatbots for clients and into building games for Alexa and the rest is history.

We chat to Tom about his journey, what he's learned, his thoughts on the industry and advice for others looking to build successful skills and actions on Alexa and Google Assistant.

Here's the running order:

00:02:50​ About Tom Hewitson and Labworks.io

00:05:50​ Last year's Alexa skills usage

00:09:30​ Was it good timing to launch Voice Arcade?

00:11:15​ Ten hot takes on voice: what's changed in voice since 2019?

00:13:00​ What's changed for the better?

00:15:20​ Developer rewards: how helpful were they?

00:19:15​ What works and what doesn't for in-skill purchasing?

00:20:00​ What's the difference in typical ISPs vs Voice Arcade?

00:22:15​ Challenges with ISPs, offering more value than you're asking for in return

00:24:30​ How are you showing value?

00:26:00​ Vishnu Saran: How are you solving discoverability?

00:30:40​ Marek Mis: Advice for hobbyist voice devs wanting to go pro?

00:33:40​ Is there much experimentation left?

00:38:40​ How do you prioritise and test features?

00:40:55​ Any new platform features you're excited about?

00:43:00​ Matt Buck: Have you thought about putting your games in apps or on web?

00:47:09​ Katy Boungard: Brand identity and sonic branding

00:49:20​ Richard Warzecha: Discovering features within skills

00:50:00​ How much time is spent on happy path vs everything else?

00:55:44​ Manual testing vs code testing

00:57:05​ Example of something that took a lot of iteration to get right

00:58:35: Richard Warzecha: Transferable principles from games to other voice experiences

01:03:00​ Tooling and Jovo

01:04:00​ General takeaways and contact details

Links

Labworks.io

Follow Tom Hewitson on Twitter

Join Tom Hewitson on LinkedIn

Say "Alexa, open Voice Arcade"

Say "Hey Google, open Voice Arcade"

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Derek Roberti is the VP Technology, North America, at Cognigy, based in California. He joins us to share his insights and observations on using conversational AI automation in the enterprise for automating service delivery. 

We chat to Derek about:

• Cognigy and its history
• Democratising AI
• The need for market education 
• The balance between technical capability and ease of use in conversational AI tools
• Marrying conversational AI with Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Whether conversational AI tools will converge
• How and if we'll see conversational automation within voice assistants

Links

Visit Cognigy.com

Connect with Derek Roberti on Linkedin

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Nate Brown is the Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, world-leading CX consultancy. He joins us to share how a customer-centric culture shaped around customer feedback can create the conditions and insights needed to build products and services that customers love. 

The exact same methodologies and practices can feed directly into your conversational automation strategy to make sure you're consistently meeting customer needs.

At the same time, the data and insights you produce from the automated conversations you have with customers can be like gold dust, and can be fed back into the voice of the customer operation in the rest of the business.

We chat with Nate about:

• The value of a voice of the customer strategy
• The importance of staff feedback
• Voice of the customer process
• The listening path
• Empowerment and action
• Sentiment vs intent
• Implementation challenges

Links

Officium Labs

Connect with Nate Brown on LinkedIn

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Nate Brown is the Chief Experience Officer at Officium Labs, world-leading CX consultancy. He joins us to share how a customer-centric culture shaped around customer feedback can create the conditions and insights needed to build products and services that customers love. 

The exact same methodologies and practices can feed directly into your conversational automation strategy to make sure you're consistently meeting customer needs.

At the same time, the data and insights you produce from the automated conversations you have with customers can be like gold dust, and can be fed back into the voice of the customer operation in the rest of the business.

We chat with Nate about:

• The value of a voice of the customer strategy
• The importance of staff feedback
• Voice of the customer process
• The listening path
• Empowerment and action
• Sentiment vs intent
• Implementation challenges

Links

Officium Labs

Connect with Nate Brown on LinkedIn

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When it comes to making customer interactions with conversational AI more human-like, there's often one thing missing. Emotion.

We chat to Nico Perony about how OTO.ai is being used to understand emotion and sentiment of users in order for businesses to create more compelling customer experiences.

Married with conversational AI, bots can be more sensitive to the caller based on their emotional state and even do things like escalate calls to an agent based on an angry customer response.

It's also being used to support agents in call centres to appraise tone and improve how agents speak with customers, as well as in gaming applications to detect abuse and toxicity and escalate occurrences to moderators.

There is huge potential for this technology, not only in automating customer experience in a more human-like way, but also to gather insights from customer and staff voice relations and use it to improve the quality of service offered.

We also continued this discussion on Clubhouse afterwards. Follow @kanesimms on Clubhouse for more open ended after show discussions.

Links

Visit OTO.ai

Connect with Nico on LinkedIn

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When I was on the Voicebot podcast, Bret asked me whether we're going through a voice first winter. I said that I didn't think so, nor did I really care. There are opportunities to do good work and enhance people's lives regardless. However, there has been an undercurrent in pockets of the industry where some folks are becoming frustrated that voice hasn't reached its potential (however you define that).

Over the past few weeks, founder of WitLingo, Ahmed Bouzid was involved in a conversation at the popular VoiceLunchmeet where a participant stated that:

‘Beyond the weather, time, and the occasional timer and alarm,’ they mused out loud, ‘am I myself really using my Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant that much in my life? I mean, really and honestly, am I? No, actually, not really…. So, if I am not using them that much and yet I am such a believer in Voice First, what hope is there for the rest of the world?’

He wrote a piece summarising his thoughts. This coincided with a post from Bespoken.io founder, John Kelvie's post claiming voice is stuck.

The primary questions raised in both of these two pieces are:

• Is voice living up to its promise?
• Where is the true value in voice first?
• Has there been enough improvement in the technology and ecosystem to support its own ecosystem like the App Store?

To debate this, we brought along Voicebot.ai founder Bret Kinsella, together with Ahmed and John to figure out where we actually stand and where we need to go next. 

We also continued this discussion on Clubhouse afterwards. Follow @kanesimms on Clubhouse for more open ended after show discussions.

Links

Read voicebot.ai

Check out WitLingo and Bespoken

Read Voice is stuck

Read The #VoiceFirst User Interface Has a Use Case Fit Problem

Read Voice first sucks

Follow Ahmed, John and Bret on Twitter

Connect with Ahmed, John and Bret on LinkedIn

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Resemble.ai is a cutting edge synthetic voice (text-to-speech) provider that allows anyone or any brand to create their own, customer TTS solution to use across any and all channels. From IVR, Alexa and Google Assistant to narrating videos and marketing materials and even voicing game characters. With just 50 lines of speech, you could have your own dedicated brand voice that brings a consistent and elevated customer experience to your conversational applications. With quicker-than-real-time processing, the low latency capabilities makes having a conversation with a Resemble.ai-voiced assistant as natural as can be.

In this episode of VUX World, we're joined by founder and CEO, Zohaib Ahmed, to discuss the work Resemble is doing to help brands create stand-out conversational experiences. We discuss what Resemble is and how it works, the value of having your own custom voice, the use cases and applications it's being used for, the process for creating, the editing and publishing tools for customising intonation and emotion, as well as the ethical considerations around voice cloning, fraud and deep fakes.

00:00 Intro

02:55 About Zohaib Ahmed and Resemble.ai

04:47 What are people using Resemble.ai for today?

07:37 How much dialogue is needed to create a TTS voice?

08:27 Voice Talent Pool: what's that?

11:50 Bondad: How far off are we from high quality rendering at run time with low latency?

14:00 What's the process for creating a custom brand voice?

17:00 Are call centres cloning staff voices?

19:00 An alternative approach from a branded assistant

21:10 Ethics of voice cloning

24:20 Resemblyzer and tackling speaker verification

27:40 Matthew James-Dewstowe: Can you tweak the voice once its created?

31:40 Jay Ruparel: How do you handle dynamic speech and keep the voice integrity?

37:40 Sean Thornton: Predicting emotion

41:00 Heidi Cohen: Regionalisation and localisation

44:45 Real time translation of speech

48:20 Jay Ruparel: Thoughts on filler words like 'um', 'ah' etc

51:37 Proving the value and ROI

01:00:40 Where can people find out more about Resemble.ai

Visit Resemble.ai 

Follow Resemble.ai on Twitter

Zohaib Ahmed on Twitter and LinkedIn

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Mihai Antonescu joins us to discuss the history of voice at Mercedes, the origins of the HeyMercedes voice assistant and the process for building it.

You'll also learn tips and tricks that'll help you put together your approach to creating your own assistant, as well as how to understand and measure the business value voice assistants can bring.

Mihai asked us before the show to challenge him with our questions, and we certainly hope we did.

Connect with Mihai Antonescu on LinkedIn or Twitter

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Mihai Antonescu joins us to discuss the history of voice at Mercedes, the origins of the HeyMercedes voice assistant and the process for building it.

You'll also learn tips and tricks that'll help you put together your approach to creating your own assistant, as well as how to understand and measure the business value voice assistants can bring.

Mihai asked us before the show to challenge him with our questions, and we certainly hope we did.

Connect with Mihai Antonescu on LinkedIn or Twitter

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Justin Randall, Chief Innovation Officer at Comwave, one of Canada's largest independent telco companies, joins us to share his experiences of designing, building and implementing a Google DialogFlow agent in the contact centre.

We'll cover the drivers for doing it, the process he followed, the things he learned and advice for doing the same.

00:00 Intro

04:30 About Justin Randall and Comwave

10:30 Replacing the IVR

12:23 What can 'Penny' do?

13:39 How do you determine success for your conversational AI

19:30 Understanding where you should start

21:50 Who manages the updates and maintenance?

23:20 Glen Ritchie: What KPIs do you use for your conversational AI?

26:15 How much time is spent defining requirements?

27:44 Heidi Cohen: What books and resources would you recommend?

29:29 John Novak: Do you use a tree structure like in IVR?

32:23 Deymi Campos: How fast can you deploy a change in your conversational AI?

35:50 What does your automated testing set up look like?

40:24 Andrew Francis: Are you using the DialogFlow Telephone Gateway?

43:45 Deymi Campos: Sometimes different TFNs need different config, do you have this feature?

45:15 Georgios Tserdanelis: Did you design a persona for Penny or use a custom voice?

48:37 jusfc: Is Penny available as a chatbot as well?

51:10 Advice for people starting out in their conversational AI journey

56:00 Closing thoughts from Justin

Connect with Justin Randall

Cognitive Virtual Assistants Using Google Dialogflow

Voice Applications for Alexa and Google Assistant (Manning)

Designing Voice User Interfaces (O'Reilly)

Designing Bots (O'Reilly)

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