VUX World

This week, we're speaking to serial entrepreneur, Yann Lachelle, COO at Snips, about the privacy by design alternative to Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

Privacy is a hot topic. With the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the introduction of GDPR in Europe, people are becoming more aware and more concerned with how companies are using their data.

On the enterprise-side, one of the challenges preventing companies from implementing voice is the apprehension towards sending sensitive data to Amazon or Google.

The Paris-based startup is bringing a privacy-first approach to their voice assistant. We speak to Snips' COO Yann Lachelle about the details and how you can use it

In this episodes, we discuss:

• What Snips is and its position in the market
• Why privacy is a concern for consumers and companies
• Snips' approach to voice and privacy
• Edge computing and how Snips is tackling security
• Open sourcing the backend of the Snips assistant
• Blockchain and decentralising the voice ecosystem

Yann Lachelle is a serial entrepreneur. He's founded and sold several companies and has a 100% record of founding and exiting. Yann's experience in the startup world is vast and his knowledge on AI and the voice industry is more than impressive.

As COO of Snips, Yann is helping Snips make technology disappear by bringing to market the world's first privacy-by-design voice assistant.

Yann brings us some inspiring stories, intensely relevant insights and plenty of observations that'll help you get a full understanding of what Snips can offer you or your clients.

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Visit the Snips website

Try Snips for developers

Join the Snips community on Discord

Check out Snips' whitepaper explaining the details of their blockchain ambitions

Find out more about Snips and blockchain

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This week, Dustin and I catch up with John Kelvie, CEO and founder of Bespoken, and learn all about the three types of testing that can help you create and sustain great voice experiences.

We discuss:

• Unit testing:how to test your code locally without having to deploy into the cloud and test through your smart speaker or phone. This can save developers a whole load of time and effort in the development phase.
• End to end testing:how to automate testing of utterances and intents to make sure you're returning the correct response to the various utterances that can be fed through your skill or action. This saves the QA folks time as you no longer need to fire up your skill or action and physically test every possible utterance.
• Continuous testing:making sure that your continue to keep on top of the ever-changing AI operating systems and ensuring your skill or action is always operating as intended.

We also discuss the convergence of usability testing and technical testing and how they can play together, as well as hear John's take on the future of voice.

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https://bespoken.io

Bespoken on twitter

Check out Bespoken's webinars

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Tony Lizza, Project Manager at Apollo Matrix, shares his battle scars from working on the technical implementation of the Netflix 13 Reasons Why interactive cinema experience.

This was a voice and video experience that was deployed through the mobile web browser and was used to promote Netflix's biggest show, 13 Reasons Why.

Dustin Coates and I talk to Tony all about the creation of the experience and the technical challenges Tony and his team faced in implementing something so bleeding-edge, including taking advantage of new APIs that allow developers to access a user's mic and video from within a web browser on mobile and how to handle a lack of that functionality within the walled gardens of social media.

We discuss using a fallback touch-based experience, the surprising results of user testing, as well as the technical details of how to do speech to text from within a browser and plenty more.

Here's a promo video for the experience that gives you a flavour:

13 Reasons Why - Talk to the Reasons - Netflixfrom Moth + Flameon Vimeo.

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www.talktothereasons.com

apollomatrix.com

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We're starting a new feature on VUX World: The Run Down. Dustin Coates and I are getting together each week (or bi-weekly) to discuss the recent happenings in the voice space and how that'll impact designers, developers and brands.

We're starting off by discussing the Amazon Alexa feature that developers have been clambering for since 2016: the settings API.

With the settings API, you can access the user's timezone (among other things) and use that within your skill to personalise the voice experience for your users. You can send them targeted push notificationsat the appropriate time and use their preferred weather measurement (Celsius or Fahrenheit).

We discuss Eric Olsen's (3PO Labs) in-depth review of the settings APIand how it could be the beginning of something bigger.

We also discuss Scott Huffman's post (VP Engineering, Google Assistant) on the five insights on voice technologyand how they should impact your approach. For example, focusing on utilities and understanding what kind of things people use Assistant for at different times of day.

We delve into the Voysis and Voicebot study on vCommerceand discuss how voice on mobile is so important, yet how it's bubbling away under the surface, not grabbing many headlines.

Finally, we discuss the latest Alexa Skills Challenge: Games, in-skill purchases on Storyline (check out VUX World with Vasili Shynkarenka, CEO, Storyline) and the new Alexa feature that allows anyone to create icons for their skills.

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The Power of Habit book

Hooked book

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Alexa Accelerator 2018 featured startup, Voiceitt, gives people with speech impairments their voice back. Today, we're joined by co-founder and VP Strategy, Sara Smolley, to hear all about it.

The There are millions of people across the globe who have non-standard speech. People who've had a stroke or who have multiple sclerosis or cerebral pausey, for example. Voiceitt's advanced speech recognition system, which is deployed through an app, allows those people to speak and be understood.

Once it's configured, all you do is speak through the app and Voiceitt will do the rest, handling speech to text and displaying the text on-screen whilst a synthetic voice speaks the words to you.

For all that's said about voice being accessible, Voiceitt's mission is to open up voice technology to the rest of the world.

After working in Hong Kong and South Korea in marketing and startup consulting, Sara moved to Tel Aviv to help build and establish Voiceitt. Sara travels across the globe working on the strategic side of the business, building relationships, gathering insights and bringing the powerful mission and technology that Voiceitt posses to the world.

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http://www.voiceitt.com

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Ben Sauer is a Design Strategist who's worked with some of the world's well known brands: Virgin, Tesco, Pearsons, British Gas, Penguin Random House, BBC. Ben worked with Clearleft as a Design Strategist for many years and more recently turned his attention to how voice will change design.

Over the last couple of years, Ben has been focusing on helping brands navigate the voice space and figure out how voice will impact their business, as well as where to start with a voice strategy.

Ben joins Dustin and I today to discuss the ins and outs of voice first design strategy, including finding a use case and the differences between voice design strategy and design strategy in general.

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Follow Ben Sauer on Twitter

Visit voiceprinciples.com

BenSauer.net

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The first in a new series called 'Unscripted' where we have off-the-cuff, unscripted conversations with voice first leaders and practitioners to get acquainted, hear their story and find out how they do what they do.

In this first episode, we speak to Alexa Skill developing veteran, Nick Schwab, founder of Invoked Apps, about:

• User adoption of his Ambient Sound skills (his daily usage is huge!)
• In skill purchasing and his conversation rates (surprising!)
• Developer rewards and how it all works
• How much it costs to host a successful skill
• Why now is the time for Europe to invest heavily
• The discoverability crisis and what's changed

Follow Nick Schwab on Twitter

Check out Invoked Apps

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In this episode, we take a deep dive into conversational commerce: what it is, what's possible and how you can turn conversing strangers into paying customers.

Charles Cadbury is the co-founder of Say It Now, a company that helps brands respond the the growing consumer need for immediacy. Charlie's history is impressive. He's seen more than 1,000 client briefs and delivered over 300 digital projects, many of them related to commerce. After working with Lola Tech to create the Dazzle platform, Charlie's attention remains focused on conversational interactions and helping brands convert conversations into commerce.

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Check out the Say It Now website

Follow Charles on Twitter

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We celebrate the 6 month anniversary of VUX World by reviewing the modev Voice Summit event that took place last week in Newark. We anchor on the Voice Summit to take stock of 2018 and look forward to what brands, designers and developers should be focusing on over the next 6 months.

To guide us through #VOICE18, Dustin and I are joined by Tim Kahle and Dominik Meißner, founders of 169 Labs.

169 Labs are running a voice first conference of their own on 12th October in Munich: All About Voice.

For a chance to win 2 free tickets to the event, just send a tweet using #AllAboutVoice and answer the question: why is 2018 all about voice?

169 Labs will pick a random winner who'll receive 2 free tickets to the conference.

Use the code VUXWORLD to save 10%.

Buy tickets

Check out the Voice Summit website

Visit the All About Voice website

Visit the 169 Labs website

See the 169 Labs and Amazon Twitch broadcast

See Tim Kahle's slides from his talk

Read Dustin Coates' write up on day 1

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This week, we’re speaking to RAIN agency’s Will Hall and Jason Herndon about how their three pillars of: strategy, creativity and technology, are leading the world's biggest brands to voice first success.

In this episode, RAIN’s Executive Creative Director, Will Hall, and VP, Engineering, Jason Herndon guide us through the practicalities of how they shape voice strategies and implement voice first solutions for the world's biggest brands.

Whether you're a brand, a designer or developer, this episode will help you understand how and where to start.

It’ll give you things to consider and help you align voice first initiatives with core business drivers.

It’ll show you what you can expect from working with (or at) a voice first agency and give you some examples of how industry-leading brands are approaching voice.

It’ll also present some of the challenges you’ll face and maybe even challenge your own thinking on whether your organisation is set-up for success, including showing you why 'systems thinking' is so important.

You'll understand how to hone-in on use cases that provide value.

You’ll learn how to structure a voice first project; the skills and resources you’ll need and who needs to be involved, as well as the process of going from nothing to implementing a world-leading voice experience.

It’ll show you tools that you can use for design and development, as well as guide you on the value of testing early.

It’ll also give you some ideas on how far ahead you should plan your roadmap and cover why a crawl, walk, run approach is most appropriate.

As ever, we go deep into all of the above and more - this episode is a longer one than usual, and it’s densely packed with nothing but insights.

Will Hall is the Executive Creative Director at RAIN. Will has worked on countless projects for global brands and blends the strategy and creative sides of projects together, making sure that the strategic aims of clients are brought to fruition with the appropriate creative.

Jason Herndon, VP, Engineering at RAIN, has worked with the world's largest brands on technical architecture and development and, at RAIN, is responsible for turning big ideas into reality.

RAIN has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands on some of the most headline grabbing Alexa Skills.

Campbells Kitchen and Tide were two of the first branded Alexa Skills and are still cited today as pioneering examples of how valuable voice can be for brands.

The Warner Brothers’ Dunkirk interactive story, which we discussed in our episode on voice games with Florian Hollandt, pushed the boundaries on what’s possible on the Alexa platform and brought movie-like sound design and scripting to the voice first world.

RAIN help brands big and small figure out the strategic value in bringing voice to your business and guide brands through the creation, implementation, promotion and development of voice first experiences.

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• Visit the RAIN.agency website (the newsletter link is at the top on the home page)
• Check out RAIN's development framework, Voxa
• Get in touch with RAIN or require about a project: [email protected]

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