The Future is Spoken is a voice tech podcast covering all aspects of the industry, from conversational strategy and design, through to interfaces, analytics, ethics, privacy, and career planning. The Future is Spoken is the podcast for the Digital Assistant Academy.
Episodes
Episode 38: Sonic Branding in Voice
Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Maikel Van Der Wouden about the Sonic branding in Voice Design.
Maikel van der Wouden, a highly passionate audiophile, and design engineer has a lot of experience developing voice branding strategies and audio assets for prestigious clients, including fortune 500 companies, across various industries.
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Episode 37: Voice in Education
Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Julie Daniel Davis about the Voice First Usecases for FinTecin Education.
A former accountant turned educator, Julie Daniel Davis enjoys thinking about innovative ways to enhance education and then making them happen. 15 years in the k12 setting, with the last role being Director of Instructional Technology and Innovation, led to being an educational consultant, advocate for voice technology use in education, and an adjunct Edtech professor at UT Chattanooga. Julie is striving to meet the individual needs of student and teacher and take them forward in their growth as lifelong learners in the use of Edtech. Somewhat of a futurist, she is never content with the now and is constantly striving to better the world she lives in. She is seen as a passionate person with the skills to help others catch the joy- whatever that joy might be. She is an instructional technology professional development leader/speaker, author, Amazon Alexa Champion, and Bixby Premier Developer. She believes voice technology can enhance education in mighty ways. She helps educators use technology resources to enhance critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration- all skills required for students to become influencers of their world. In 2020 Julie became a CoSN Certified Education Technology Leader (CETL). Julie is the founder and host of the Voice in Education podcast that was a finalist in the 2020 Project Voice Awards. Julie has been on the planning/steering committee for EdCamp GigCity since 2015. She has served in the past as co-moderator of Twitter Chat #TnEdChat where educators from Tennessee and beyond talk about educational technology issues. She is recognized as a leader in the Canvas LMS community, where she serves as a course facilitator for the Canvas Certified Educator program. EdTech Magazine named Julie as having one of the top K-12 I.T. Blogs for 2015. She was recognized in 2021 by Amazon Alexa in their "Women in Voice" series.
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Episode 36: Voice First Use Cases for FinTech
Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Rana Gujral about the Voice First Usecases for FinTech.
Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, investor, and CEO at Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that excels at distinguishing behavioral signals in speech data with its proprietary deep learning technology. As a thought-leader in the AI/technology space, he often leads keynote sessions and joins panel discussions at industry events such as World Government Summit, VOICE Summit, The Next Web Conference, and Blockchain Economic Forum. His bylines are featured in publications such as Hacker Noon, Voicebot.ai, SpeechTechMagazine, and is a contributing columnist at TechCrunch and Forbes. He's been recognized as 'Entrepreneur of the Month' by CIO Magazine, awarded 'US-China Pioneer' by IEIE, and listed as a Top 10 Entrepreneur to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post and an AI Entrepreneur to Watch in Inc. In 2020 he won "Contributor of the Year: Chatbots" in Hacker Noon's Noonie's Awards.
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Episode 35: Current and Future Trends of Conversational AI
Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Bret Kinsella about the Current and Future Trends of Conversational AI.
Bret is the founder, CEO, and research director of Voicebot.ai. He was named commentator of the year by the Alexa Conference in 2019 and is widely cited in media and academic research as an authority on voice assistants and AI. He is also the host of the Voicebot Podcast and editor of the Voice Insider newsletter.
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Episode 34: Evangelizing and Testing Voice Applications
Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Nicholas Sawka and Benjamin Falvo from Voice Spark about Voice Evangelism and testing.
Nicholas was recently brought on at Wanderword as their Chief Evangelist. Nick will represent Wanderword in the US in sales, networking, gathering product testers, and improving the use/onboarding of Fabula, Poptale and entertainment production.
Nick found his passion for Alexa back in 2015 when she was first released and was part of the device's initial Beta program. In 2017 he made the jump to development and has been involved with creating over 400 Alexa Skills. Further, Nicholas has experience with working on and creating Google Actions. In addition to his love for Voice First tech, he is an experienced Chief Of Operations with a demonstrated history of working in the military industry, with a Bachelor's Degree in Business Management from the University of Phoenix.
Benjamin Falvo is currently making things for Howl. Benjamin is an Intrapreneurial and strategic CIO / CTO with 20 years of diversified leadership experience across agency, startup, corporate and nonprofit environments, including numerous high-profile global projects for Fortune 500 clients. Leverages a unique blend of skills at the intersection of technical leadership, creative direction, product management, and operations management. History of ideating, designing, building and deploying highly engaging, user-friendly digital products and experiences across web, mobile, and event platforms. Weekly co-host for VoiceSpark Live Podcast on thought leadership in AI and Voice First.
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Episode 33: Designing for Empathy in Conversational AI
Empathy is the first step to design any product because it is a skill that allows us to understand and share the same feelings that others feel. Through Empathy, we can put ourselves in other people's shoes and connect with how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance, or situation. When we design products with Empathy in mind, we are making them usable and helpful.
In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Romita Bulchandani about Designing for Empathy in Conversational AI.
Several years ago, Romita Bulchandani left her corporate dream job to live her dream life. She is now living her purpose through transformational coaching while leaving glitter trails along the way. Romita works with clients from all across the globe.
As a certified coach, Romita also leans in on 15+ years of diverse leadership experience from Fortune 50 companies like The Walt Disney Company & Marriott International. Romita is driven by her real-world experiences and passion for living authentically.
You can think of her as a business magician, life coach, spiritual mentor, strategic planner, and creative problem solver. Romita will find your glitter and help you bring it to the surface. To learn more about Romita's story, you may connect with her on LinkedIn.
Episode 32: Voice design strategy for elderly population
Ryan Elza is Vice President of Innovation and Technology at Volunteers of America National Services. Before that, Ryan was Social Entrepreneurship in Residence for Social Connectedness at AARP Foundation and led AARP Foundation's social isolation and digital inclusion work. He has an extensive background in the social determinants of health, design thinking and civic engagement. He is a recognized subject matter expert on social isolation and voice-first design for older adults. He has been at the frontier of developing voice-first solutions for low-income older adults. Ryan is a trained anthropologist, and has a master's degree in technology entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland, and is an avid mentor to students and startups at various stages of development.
Prior to joining AARP Foundation, Ryan served as the Program Management Specialist and adjunct professor for the national award-winning Honors College Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program at the University of Maryland. During his tenure with EIP, Ryan developed and launched several new entrepreneurial programs and initiatives, including the EIP Terp Tank Startup Competition and the Global Entrepreneurship Semester Program. Previously, he worked at The Advisory Board Company on the performance technology team helping health systems implement transformational solutions.
Mr Elza was a social entrepreneur by the practice during his undergraduate career at the University of Maryland, where he founded and scaled the UMD Chapter of Health Leads, a non-profit that trained and placed students in primary care clinics as family advocates for low-income families to find resources such as food, housing, and job training. During his tenure, he worked with hospital administrators, primary care physicians, university administrators, and student volunteers to implement a closed-loop screening and referral system for the social determinants of health.
Episode 31: Voice Design Strategy for Kids
Matthew Hammersley is the Founder and CEO of the novel effect, which uses voice recognition combined with sound effects to enhance storytime for parents, teachers, and children. Matt was previously a patent attorney for various companies.
During his daughter's baby shower function, an idea for bringing new technology like voice recognition to the timeless tradition of reading aloud to children and making storytelling more engaging came to his mind. That is when he quit his job to start the company novel effect. Matt comes from a chemical engineering background from Clemson University.
Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing voice design strategies for everyone.
Episode 30: Voice Design Strategy for Everyone
The Future is Spoken presents Susan and Scot Westwater as this week's guests.
Susan and Scot Westwater are the husband-and-wife co-founders of Pragmatic Digital where they advise the world's most innovative brands that want to capitalize on the incredible opportunity Voice represents. Through their consultancy, Susan and Scot help clients solve their marketing and customer experiences problems using customer-centric approaches to plan and create useful and usable Voice experiences for their audiences.
They have presented and authored several talks, workshops, articles, and ebooks focused on the role Voice technology plays in marketing and business strategy. Together, they authored the book Voice Strategy: Creating Useful and Usable Voice Experiences and are working on a second book titled Voice Marketing which will be released in Spring 2022.
Susan and Scot are also co-founders of Voice Masters, an online education program designed to teach innovative business teams about Voice and Voice strategy and ambassadors for the Open Voice Network and instructors for the Marketing AI Institute AI Academy. They both were recognized in Voicebot's Top 68 Leaders in Voice 2020, and Scot was recently included in Sound Hound's "Top 40 Voice AI Influencers to Follow on Twitter."
Episode 29: Collaboration in Conversation Design
Ilana Meir is a Conversation Designer at Facebook Reality Labs. There, she works with a cross-functional team with AR/VR technologies, namely Oculus and Portal. Ilana approaches her work with a cultural lens: first seeking to understand the cultural underpinnings of behavior in a space and then how a new product will affect them. For her contributions to the design field and voice community, Speech Technology magazine named Ilana a "Speech Technology Luminary”.
Daniel Suissa is a software engineer at Facebook Reality Labs, working on knowledge bases for conversational AIs focusing on media-related interactions. He previously helped build the personal finance manager Exeq (acquired by RetailWorx), helping young folks understand their spending and connect with their favorite local merchants. Daniel comes from a background in data representation and understanding from the IDF, where I led a team of analysts that advised military leadership on resource management & strategy.
Episode 28: Conversations With AI
The Future is Spoken presents Jonathan Bloom as this week’s guest.
Jonathan is a Senior Conversation Designer for Google, focusing on the Google Assistant. Jon was previously the UX Research Lead for Jibo, Inc., creators of the social robot of the same name. Jon was also Senior Voice User Interface Manager for Nuance Communications, where he sat on Nuance’s Innovation Steering Committee. Over his 20-year career, Jon has designed graphic, speech, and multimodal user interfaces for robots, IVR’s, dictation software, cars, and mobile applications. Jon holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the New School for Social Research.
Episode 27: Standardizing Voice Experiences
The Future is Spoken presents Jon Stine as this week’s guest.
Jon Stine is the Executive Director of The Open Voice Network (OVN), a non-profit global association dedicated to bringing the benefit of standards to the world of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistance. The OVN is a Directed Fund of The Linux Foundation.
He brings to this role more than 30 years of global leadership in the commerce and technology industries.
Jon’s retail industry knowledge was first shaped in the womenswear apparel business, as he headed sales of a well-known national brand to leading US department and specialty stores. In 2000, he joined the Intel Corporation to create and head its first global outreach to the retail and consumer goods industry. In the years that followed, he was a co-founder of the Metro Group Future Store Initiative in Germany, and the Pan-Pearl River Delta Initiative that first brought digital transparency to the China-to-US supply chain.
He joined Cisco Systems retail-CPG consulting team in late 2006, and later headed Cisco’s North America consulting practice for retail-CPG. In 2014, he returned to Intel as the Global Enterprise Sales General Manager for the retail, hospitality, and consumer goods industries. He stepped away from Intel in 2019 to build The Open Voice Network.
Through the years, Jon has worked directly with customers across the Americas, Western and Central Europe, Middle East, India, China, and Japan, as well as delivery partners in hardware, software, services, and consulting.
Jon resides in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Episode 26: Art Of Crafting Natural Conversations
The Future is Spoken presents Jeff Adams as this week's guest. Jeff has been leading prominent speech & language technology research for more than 20 years. Until 2009, he worked at Nuance / Dragon, where he was responsible for developing and improving speech recognition for Nuance's "Dragon" dictation software. He presided over many of the critical improvements in the 1990s and 2000s that brought this technology into the mainstream and enabled widespread consumer adoption.
After leaving Nuance, Jeff joined Yap, a company specializing in voicemail-to-text transcription. He assembled a strong team of 12 speech scientists who, within two brief years, were able to beat all competitors on an unbiased test set. They also matched the performance of a competitor who used (off-shore) human transcription.
Yap's success caught the interest of Amazon, who wanted to jump-start their new speech & language research lab. Upon acquisition, Jeff led efforts to build one of the industry-leading speech & language groups. His Amazon team developed products such as the Echo, Dash, and Fire TV. Jeff left Amazon in 2014 to found Cobalt Speech and Language.
Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing crafting natural conversations for the bot.
Episode 25: Building Trust With Voice Interactions
The Future is Spoken presents Elaine Lee as this week's guest.
Elaine Lee is a designer specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a focus on ethical AI. She's currently a Principal Product Designer at Twilio on the AI team, and previously led the design of eBay's AI-powered shopping assistant on Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant.
Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing building a trustworthy voice assistant
Episode 24: Natural Sounding Synthetic Voice
The Future is Spoken presents Marco Pasqua as this week's guest.
Marco Pasqua was born on July 4, 1985, weighing only 2 pounds 10 ounces and was 3 months premature; he would later be diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. When he was only 10 years old, Marco was invited to be the ambassador/host of the Timmy’s Christmas Telethon with local radio legend Red Robinson. This was his first opportunity to speak in front of a large audience; it was then that he realized the impact that words can have but he had no idea that this would later turn into his career.
Episode 23: Accessibility And Inclusion in Voice
The Future is Spoken presents Marco Pasqua as this week's guest.
Marco Pasqua was born on July 4, 1985, weighing only 2 pounds 10 ounces and was 3 months premature; he would later be diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. When he was only 10 years old, Marco was invited to be the ambassador/host of the Timmy’s Christmas Telethon with local radio legend Red Robinson. This was his first opportunity to speak in front of a large audience; it was then that he realized the impact that words can have but he had no idea that this would later turn into his career.
Episode 22: Empathy And Inclusion in Voice Design
The Future is Spoken presents Maaike Coppens as this week's guest. Maaike is an international Conversation Design Expert, speaker and co-author of the Voice UX Workbook. With a successful background in linguistics and UX design, Maaike found conversational design the perfect blend.
Episode 21: Designing Conversational Bots for Enterprise
The Future is Spoken presents Greg Bennett as this week's guest. Since its inception, Greg is Conversation Design Principal at Salesforce, leading the company's first dedicated Conversation Design practice. As a linguist, Greg focuses on empowering businesses to create chatbots that feel natural and helpful, build user trust, and meet customer expectations for conversational behaviour.
Episode 20: Explainable VUI
"The Future is Spoken" presents Dr Maria Aretoulaki as this week's guest. Maria is a Voice First Veteran, having been designing Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) since 1996, long before Voice Assistants, but also before telephone self-service and Speech IVRs were mainstream. She got into Voice Design through a Post-Doc in Spoken Dialogue Management for Speech Recognition applications, after getting a PhD and an MSc in NLP and Machine Learning and, earlier, a BA (Hons) in Linguistics & English.
Episode 19: Building conversation design teams within an organization
The Future is Spoken presents Obaid Ahmed as this week's guest. Obaid is founder and CEO of Botmock, the leading chatbot design collaboration platform. Before Botmock, Obaid co-founded a design consultancy firm OAK where he led the technology and design teams to deliver over 400 projects. Today, Obaid focuses on building on the success of Botmock to make it a real driver in building the next generation of conversational apps.
Episode 18: How to build the future of voice?
The Future is Spoken presents Jeff Blankenburg as this week’s guest. Jeff spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. Today, he works on the Amazon Alexa team helping developers make Alexa even smarter. Jeff has also spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, Sydney, Tokyo, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. Read the full show notes
Episode 17: Designing Omnichannel Conversations
The Future is Spoken presents Celene Osiecka as this week’s guest to discuss Designing Omnichannel Conversations. Celene is an experienced conversational designer and the current Practice Lead and Senior Director of Conversation Design at 24[7].ai. For the last fifteen year, she has been designing conversational interfaces using emerging technologies such as chatbots, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR),
and Machine Learning. Read the full show notes
Episode 16: Conversations with Things
The Future is Spoken presents Diana Diebel as this week’s guest to discuss all things conversational design. Diana is an experienced Voice User Interface (VUI) designer and the current Design Director at Grand Studio, a Chicago-based product design and strategy consultancy. She is also the co-founder of both the VUI Design Slack channel and the Chicago chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and colleges across the country, including SXSW, SpeechTEK, VOICE, Northwestern and Columbia University. Read the full show notes
Episode 15: Voice-First Use Cases for Healthcare
The Future is Spoken presents Dr. Teri Fisher as this week’s guest. Dr. Fisher, dubbed “The Voice Doctor,” is an award-winning TEDx and keynote performer, physician, podcaster, author, educator, and leading authority on all things voice technology. Read the full show notes
Episode 14: Evolution of Conversational AI Platforms
Roger is currently a Senior Developer Evangelist for Viv Labs, the platform behind Samsung’s Bixby 2 voice engine. He works with executives, designers, and developers on voice and conversational AI strategy and execution. Read the full show notes
Episode 13: Ethics in Voice Design
The Future is Spoken presents Renée Cummings as this week’s guest. Among many roles, Renée is a criminologist, criminal psychologist, AI ethicist, data activist, urban technologist, and international consultant. Read the full show notes
Episode 12: Voice Analytics and Performance Optimization
The Future is Spoken presents Phillip Hunter as this week’s guest. Phillip is an expert in strategy, design, and AI-powered optimization. He is the founder of CCAI (Conversational Collaborative AI) Services and is part of the team behind Alexa. In this episode, Phillip discusses voice analytics and performance optimization techniques. Read the full show notes
Episode 11: Writing For Listenability
The Future is Spoken presents Hans van Dam as this week’s guest. Hans is the co-founder and CEO of the Conversation Design Institute, which trains and certifies conversation designers from around the world. In this episode, Hans discusses the importance of writing for listenability. Read the full show notes
Episode 10: Building a Voice Assistant for Pandora
The Future is Spoken presents Ananya Sharan as this week’s guest. Ananya is a search and voice expert working as the product manager for Pandora’s Voice Mode, a mobile-only voice assistant that allows users to easily discover and listen to new music. In this episode, Ananya explores the rewards and challenges of working with voice assistant technology. Read the full show notes
Episode 9: Natural Language Understanding
In this episode The Future is Spoken podcast, Deborah Dahl, a natural language understanding expert, explores natural language understanding and its role in the world of voice technology. Read the full show notes
Episode 8: Creating Human-Like Conversational Abilities
Your voice interface creation will only be successful if it possesses human traits such as empathy and imperfection. Senior conversational designer Jason Gilbert digs deep into imbuing your voice interface with human-like conversational abilities in this fascinating episode of The Future is Spoken. Read the full show notes
Episode 7: Use Cases for Voice-First Interfaces
This week’s guest on The Future is Spoken is Brielle Nickoloff. Brielle is a conversational designer based in Washington DC. A passion for language and the patterns of language use led Brielle to a career in voice tech. Read the full show notes
Episode 6: The Power of Conversational Design
The Future is Spoken is excited to present Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek as this week’s guest. As many listeners will know, Joan is the founder and CEO of Women in Voice, an international organization she created to empower women and minority genders in voice technology. Read the full show notes
Episode 5: Designing for Voices in Conversational Design
The Future is Spoken presents Brooke Hawkins as a guest in this episode - Designing for Voices in Conversational Design. Brook is a conversational designer based in Detroit, Michigan. She defines conversational design as any back and forth between a human and an interface. Read the full show notes
Episode 4: Voice Strategies in Conversational Design
The Future is Spoken is pleased to have Sina Kahen as a guest in our latest episode - Voice Strategies. Sina is a voice strategist based in London, U.K, and he shares a huge amount of information with listeners in this episode. Read the full show notes
Episode 3: Conversational Interfaces
In Conversational Interfaces, we speak with Keri Roberts, owner of Branding Connection. Based in New Jersey, Keri helps brands and businesses discover what they are great at and amplify it. She is a content marketer, and this includes a lot in the audio space, such as chatbots, voice interaction, and podcasts. Read the full show notes
Episode 2: Paths Into Voice Interaction Design
In today’s episode Rebecca Evanhoe, a conversation designer and strategist, discusses pathways into voice interaction design, also called conversational design. Based in New York, Rebecca’s own journey into conversational design is a fascinating story. It starts with a chemistry degree and then a master of fine arts in fiction writing. Read the full show notes
Episode 1: New Voice Interaction Course Launched
Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of The Future is Spoken, a new podcast show produced by the Digital Assistant Academy. This show accompanies The Digital Assistant Academy’s course, entitled Voice Interaction Design. Read the full show notes
Introducing the Digital Assistant Academy
Welcome to the trailer episode of The Future is Spoken, a new podcast show produced by the Digital Assistant Academy. The Future is Spoken will accompany The Digital Assistant Academy’s very first course, entitled Voice Interaction Design, set to launch in October, 2020. Read the full show notes
