VUX World

We catch up with 4 Amazon Alexa Champions to discuss the then, now and future of the Alexa skills ecosystem and the voice first community.

Readspeaker is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services.

Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, voice application, automobile, robot, public service announcement system, website or anywhere else, Readspeaker have you covered.

They've been in the TTS game for over 20 years and have in-depth knowledge and experience in AI and Deep Neural Networks, which they put to work in creating custom TTS voices for the world's biggest brands.

If you're in the market for any form of TTS technology, check out Readspeaker today.

The Alexa Champions program is an honorary award given by Amazon in recognition of great service to the Alexa platform and ecosystem.

All four of today's guests are Alexa Champions, and they take us for a walk down memory lane and discuss:

• what the community and the voice first ecosystem was like when they first started
• what made them start building Alexa skills
• the signs that signalled things were going well
• the current state of the voice first community
• what they wish for in future

Steve Arkonovich and Eric Olsen were two of the very first Alexa Champions. Nick Schwab followed in the next batch, then Tim Kahle.

Steve was building skills before the Alexa Skills Kit even existed! Over time, he's built up a rack of skills published under his company, Philosophical Creations. His skill, Big Sky, is one of the most used skills on the platforms and is to this day a sterling example of a great voice first and multi modal experience.

Some of Eric Olsen's first skills were Complibot and Insultibot, skills that generate random compliments and insults for users every day. Eric is the founder of 3PO Labs has always been a keen member of the voice community and is one of the most active members in the Alexa Slack channel, offering help, advice and guidance for budding skill developers.

Nick Schwab is the founder of Invoked apps and runs some of the most used skills on the Alexa platform. His suite of sleep sounds bring in around 300,000 users per day, a side hustle that famously earned him enough money to buy a Tesla.

Tim Kahle is the co-founder of 169 Labs, based out of Germany and the organiser of the All About Voice conference. Tim and co-founder, Dominik Meißner, won an Alexa hackathon in Germany in 2016, released a series of skills and founded one of the leading voice agencies in Germany off the back of it. The All About Voice conference in Munich is the leading voice first event in Europe.

Steve on Twitter and LinkedIn

Eric on Twitter and LinkedIn

Nick on Twitter and LinkedIn

Tim on Twitter and LinkedIn

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Twilio is a magical tool, and Autopilot is its NLU platform that voice devs and designers need to check out. In this episode we're taking a look at what Autopilot is, what are its core concepts, and how it differs from other NLU services.

To get $10 free, use our referral link at www.twilio.com/referral/ZQRq9v

Music featured in this episode:

Blossoming by Sound of Music

Logjam by Sound of Music

Saunter by Sound of Music

Massive_Attack by Sound of Music

Tiny_Spoons by Sound of Music

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Adva Levin joins us to share why you should design personas for your voice apps, how you can create them, as well as how to work with voice acting talent.

Readspeaker is a pioneering voice technology company that provides lifelike Text to Speech (TTS) services.

Whether you're needing a TTS voice for your IVR system, voice application, automobile, robot, public service announcement system, website or anywhere else, Readspeaker have you covered.

They've been in the TTS game for over 20 years and have in-depth knowledge and experience in AI and Deep Neural Networks, which they put to work in creating custom TTS voices for the world's biggest brands.

If you're in the market for any form of TTS technology, check out Readspeaker today.

Clifford Nass and Scott Brave, in their book Wired for Speech, showed that whether you want to or not, humans cannot help but form a picture in their minds about the voice they're hearing. 

Just from a voice alone, we can form an understanding of the gender, age, education, location and mood of someone, and more.

So whether you create a persona for your voice applications or not, your users will form one anyway. 

That's why its so important to create one, so that you can try and establish some consistency in the mind of your users. 

Having a persona documented is also like a style guide for conversation designers. It helps guide writing and creates synergy on projects where many designers are needed. 

Adva Levin has created some of the most recognisable and award winning Alexa skills, including Kids Court, and also provides consultancy and design services for organisations through her company, Pretzel Labs. Most of Adva's work requires some kind of persona design. So who better to take us through the why's and the how's?

Pretzel Labs

Adva Levin and Pretzel Labs on Twitter

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Sarah Andrew Wilson, Chief Content Officer at Matchbox.io, shares the secret sauce for creating the kind of Alexa skills you can build a business on.

This week, we speak to Sarah about the Matchbox.io stable of skills and discuss:

• What it’s like maintaining 18 Alexa skills
• The Opearlo acquisition
• Unique advice for people and companies just getting started
• The 3-step Matchbox.io philosophy that runs through each of its Alexa skills
• Ecosystems and community and how the two drive engagement
• ISPs and how Matchbox.io is monetising Alexa skills
• How changing 1 word led to a 17% increase in conversions
• How Matchbox.io gets its skills discovered
• The potential for advertising on assistant platforms

Matchbox.io website

Matchbox.io on Twitter

Question of the day

Question of the day Facebook group

Sarah on LinkedIn

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The first episode of the new year is both a reflection on how far we've come in the last 12 months, and what to look forward to in the year to come. 

This is a special episode as it's the first of a new decade. And in this episode of the rundown, we're getting deep. 

Apple acquires Pullstring - Was this an acqui-hire? Or is Apple using the Pullstring tool internally? Will we ever find out? Either way, 2019 started out with a big acquisition from a big player and showed good early signs of a growing industry.

Sonos acquires Snips - Given the importance of privacy, Sonos might have struck gold with Snips, the privacy first voice tech company based in Paris. The sad thing for the industry is that Sonos will not support third party activity any longer and is keeping the tech for its own speakers.

This could happen more and more as big companies realise the value of having voice technology and the talent to create and implement it. I just hope there are enough tools leftover to support the community and third party developers. 

Voice startup funding set to triple in 2019 

Google BERT: understanding searches better than ever before, and ERNIE from Baidu, which can understand subjects and topics better than ever before, too. With these two developments on the AI front, the chances of understanding what users are asking for and being able to offer the correct response is increasing. ERNIE beats humans as far as its reading comprehension capability is concerned.

Voice interoperability initiative - On the face of it, this sounds great. Lots of organisations joining together to create standards that will allow multiple voice assistants to run on a single device so that users can choose which assistant they'd prefer to use for a given task. In reality, given that Google and Apple aren't involved in this, will it have the benefits that it proposes? Well, perhaps if Alexa is your go-to assistant, then yes. This way, Alexa is the core assistant, but then Cortana and Einstein (Salesforce) can be used for more specific tasks. 

Humans review Alexa recordings - Maybe it's just because we're so deeply ingrained in the industry that I assumed that humans reviewing mismatched or failed utterances would be obvious. Seemingly, though, the public did not. I understand that users are concerned with privacy around voice assistants and that the industry needs to respond and develop trust. However, I think this story in particular, and the others that followed it, blew things out of proportion and were used as scaremongering.

Google AI runs on device - When this was announced at I/O'19, it got some coverage, but it wasn't made as big a deal of than I'd have thought. This is the kind of thing that Snips used as it's core differentiator. Now, Google can run automatic speech recognition on the device and takes Google Assistant a step closer to being a privacy-first assistant. 

The great Google action outage - In October, Google pulled almost all of the actions on Google Assistant offline without warning. Thousands of actions just vanished. It later transpired that it was due to a potential security risk around a phishing vulnerability, but the company didn't communicate anything to anyone, at all. The story was covered by Voicebot and that's about it. Imagine if all of the apps in the app store vanished over night, without warning. I thought it was big news that deserved more coverage. 

Hugging Face raised $15 million - The big two (Amazon and Google) are talked about more often than anything else. We're guilty of this ourselves sometimes. But we know that voice is about more than those two. It's about more than smart speakers. It's the interface of the future and the opportunities for using voice span well beyond the big two. And so when we see a company that is trying to build the definitive natural language processing library, that's big news. 

How voice assistants could change the way we shop - Kane Simms, Harvard Business Review

Team Say It Now finishes third in Alexa Cup

Oren Jacob discusses conversation design on VUX World

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How do NPR approach designing voice applications? And how do they engage users to make sure that they're designing the right things for the right people, Ha-Hoa Homano, Sr. Product Manager, Emerging Platforms at NPR joins us to share all.

Read more at npr.design

Learn with npr.codes

Follow Ha-Hoa on Twitter

Audio player functionality suggestion on Alexa.uservoice.com (still pending)

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Sierra Fontana and Carissa Merrill are working hard to make the US Bank's voice services accessible to all. They join us on this episode to share how they're approaching accessibility for voice and why it's so important to prioritise accessibility early.

Presented by the Conversational Academy. Save 10% on the world's no.1 online conversation design course.

WCAG guidelines

All about VoiceItt with Sara Smolley

Join Carissa Merrill and Sierra Fontana on LinkedIn

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Sierra Fontana and Carissa Merrill are working hard to make the US Bank's voice services accessible to all. They join us on this episode to share how they're approaching accessibility for voice and why it's so important to prioritise accessibility early.

Presented by the Conversational Academy. Save 10% on the world's no.1 online conversation design course.

WCAG guidelines

All about VoiceItt with Sara Smolley

Join Carissa Merrill and Sierra Fontana on LinkedIn

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Greenwood is the CEO of the human tech agency, Greenwood Campbell. Last year, Adam and his team trialled placing voice assistants in residential homes in the UK to see whether voice assistants can help alleviate loneliness for senior citizens.

We discuss the project and the results, as well as get Adam's take on the current state of voice and what he'd like to see in 2020.

Presented by the Conversational Academy. Save 10% on the world's no.1 online conversation design course.

This episode was broadcast live on LinkedIn. To catch the next live broadcast, join Kane Simms on LinkedIn.

Adam Greenwood on LinkedIn

Greenwood Campbell website

Watch the Alleviating Loneliness video

Greenwood Campbell on Twitter

Ask Marvee with Heidi Culbertson

Helping Susan with Ruby Steel and Will Merrill

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