AiC Episode 110

In this episode, Teri will share his experience at the recent Project Voice 2020 and give us some of the highlights of the event.

He met so many like-minded people at the event, listened in on some sessions and participated in others. Bradley Metrock and his team did a great job organizing and coordinating the event. Teri had a videographer following him around for the entire duration of the event so he could capture as much content as possible to share with the Alexa in Canada audience. He was awarded the Flash Briefing of the Year award at the event.

Welcome and Enjoy!

Teri made a couple of short clips of his conversations with the people he met at the event, and the include:

Scot Westwater from Pragmatic Digital

  • Scot and his wife Susan are the founders of Pragmatic Digital and they just recently released a book that they did the book signing for at the event.
  • They also recently released a new program called Voice Masters.
  • They are focused on creating strategies for voice. They help businesses figure out what the value for their audience is, figure out what they’re trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and to actually figure out where those two intersect to create something that is useful and usable, instead of just novelty.
  • He was excited by Teri’s panel and wanted to attend the event because they hadn’t attended in 2019.
  • They will be doing a talk about strategy and the book they just released.

Noa Eshed from Trinity Audio

  • She is the CMO of Trinity Audio and attended the event to learn more about the audio and voice industry, while also learning more about the predictions for 2020.
  • She predicts that more readers will turn to listeners in 2020.
  • She thinks publications will produce their written content in audio form too.
  • She also predicts that audio advertising will evolve. This will happen through humanizing brands and telling stories.

Project Voice 2020 Highlights

Roger Kibbe of Samsung Bixby

  • He is a developer and evangelist for Samsung Bixby.
  • He is at the Project Voice to attend some sessions and do a talk.
  • He will also be giving a workshop for Bixby with his team.
  • He is excited to see how big the industry has gotten and how much momentum is around it.
  • In 2020, he sees brands getting very serious about voice, and including it in their marketing budgets.

Dr. Neil Desai of MedFlashGo

  • He is a family physician and one of the co-founders of MedFlashGo and DentalFlashGo, which are Alexa skills.
  • He is the chief marketing officer for both those skills.
  • They are focused on evolving medical education in the 21st century and training the next generation of physicians and healthcare professionals to teach, learn, create, and practice medicine in the century we live in by leveraging voice.
  • He thinks voice technology will be adopted more in 2020.

Dr. Sirish Kondabolu of Medicine Remixed Podcast

  • He is an orthopedic surgeon by training and the co-founder of Medicine Remixed which is a media company focused on podcasting and voice technology.
  • On the voice side, he is interested in the implications of voice in both patient education and provider education. He feels that there are so many simple interventions that we can do using voice.
  • One use case that he has been fascinated with is patient education specifically in orthopedic surgery with for example, post-op discharge instructions.
  • Voice is the only platform where people can do all sorts of things while listening to what they need to listen to.

Amy Stapleton of Tellables

  • She is the Founder and CEO of Tellables.
  • She will be talking at the event about merging Tellables into a brand new company called Chatables. They will be extending their storytelling experience from the lessons that they learned from their My Box of Chocolates experience and conversational stories.
  • They are building a new platform for authors and are looking into stories as a service where brands can extend their conversations with their customers by engaging with Chatables to find a conversational story that might peak the interest of customers.
  • She thinks 2020 will be a transitional year where a lot of changes will take place in voice technologies.

Andy Bellevia of KnowlesCorp

  • His company makes small microphones and speakers for mobile phones, voice assistants, smart speakers, other voice enabled IoT devices, hearables and hearing aids.
  • He is responsible for all the in-ear products, and that’s what brought him to Project Voice, to get an insight into the intersection of modern hearables, where they’re going, and how hearables will enable voice on the go wherever someone goes.
  • There has been a new Bluetooth standard for hearables that will be lower powered so hearables will have longer battery life and now they’ve become very useful to wear all day. Andy watched at CES how Google Assistant is pushing towards voice enabling third party apps.

Katherine Prescott of VoiceBrew

  • She is the founder and editor of VoiceBrew, a digital media company dedicated to helping people get the most out of Alexa. They currently have 40,000 subscribers.
  • They do a daily “One Actually Awesome Thing to Try with Alexa”
  • They also publish comprehensive feature guides on everything from Alexa routines, to drop-in, to important topics like privacy.
  • They recently launched an Alexa Tip of the Day flash brIefing largely inspired by Teri and other flash briefing creators.

Daniel Hill 

  • He teaches small business owners how to use Instagram.
  • He has a flash briefing where he talks about news, new features that have come to Instagram, strategies, tips and tricks, and answers questions on there.
  • He spoke at the event about discoverability on voice especially voice skills.

Adrian Simple of Gaming Observer

  • He runs an Alexa flash briefing called the Gaming Observer, which is ranked number one in the US and the UK.

Danny Ortiz

  • He works with an incubator in Columbus, Ohio called Wave Columbus or the Wave Innovation Center. They incubate companies and help them grow in whatever area.

David Box from Macadamian Technologies

  • He and his company presented topics on how to start up a voice skill in a voice bootcamp 101 type of session.
  • They are focused on building the future of healthcare, and voice is a large part of that. They look at many different ways where they can incorporate voice into clinical workflows, and into the everyday lives of patients in order to improve outcomes and help clinicians improve their daily lives.

Nate Treloar from Orbita

  • He sees a transformation of healthcare taking place in 2020 through the power of voice.
  • Voice has already started being used in clinical use cases transforming how patients communicate with their care providers and manage their own wellness.

Carl Robinson of the Voice Tech Podcast

  • He saw some amazing presentations at the event.
  • He has mostly been doing a range of podcast interviews with interesting people at the event.

Bret Kinsella of VoiceBot.ai

  • He was the focus of the Bret Kinsella roast during the award ceremony which was a lot of fun.
  • He also won the This Week in Voice Award for the Voice/AI Commentator of the year, and won the Voice/AI journalist of the year.
  • They educate the industry and help people make better decisions so they can understand what’s going on today and where the trends are headed.

Ray Kyle of Project Voice

  • He’s a huge part of the Project Voice team.
  • He handles business development for the event and all the Voice First events they do all over the US.
  • A big thanks to Ray for all his work on Project Voice!

Peggy Kilburn of Project Voice

  • She was too busy working to capture an audio clip(!), but this says a lot about the work ethic and commitment that Peggy had towards making sure the event went off without any problems.
  • She handled the logistics like a true professional. Thank you to Peggy for all her efforts!

Bradley Metrock of Project Voice

  • He is the CEO of Score Publishing, a new type of publishing company that help creators find voice.
  • He is the host of This Week in Voice and Executive producer of Project Voice.
  • A HUGE congrats and thanks goes out to Bradley for an incredibly successful event! Get ready for Project Voce 2021!

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

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