Collin Borns, Head of Business Development for Speechly Shares the Impact of Voice (Episode 173)
Welcome, Collin Borns!
Collin is the Head of Business Development for Speechly and is passionate about the impact that voice makes on people, technology, and organizations.
How Did Collin Get Involved with the Voice Community?
Collin got his start in the voice community when he was working in the financial operations department at Vayner Media with Gary Vaynerchuk. From there, Collin was able to get involved with the community and had the opportunity to invest in various startups at a small venture firm called Voice Punch. Collin was then presented with the opportunity to serve as the Head of Business Development for Speechly.
Speechly is a fast, accurate, and simple voice interface API for web, mobile, and e-commerce. Speechly allows developers to easily integrate voice interfaces that can understand the user the second they start speaking rather than after they finish speaking.
Voice as a Feature
Collin stated that voice is a good interface to technology, and this really leads to a different way to approach voice technology and voice-enabled experiences.
Some benefits of voice as an interface feature are that you can really focus on completing user tasks with consideration of how voice can add value. The second benefit is that it can lead to a truly multi-modal experience. Collin believes that the potential of a multi-modal experience is endless when you look at web and mobile.
How is Voice UI Thriving Today Compared to How Collin Would Like to See it Thrive in the Future?
Collin believes that today it’s about getting a task done yet it’s not possible as a third party to get the benefit of the top five use cases that we see on the smart speaker. The opportunity lies in realizing the benefits of that first-party type experience such as the web.
How Can Voice Input Make the Biggest Impact and What Does that Proof of Concept Look Like?
Collin believes that it is less department driven and we need to consider different industries along with the data and information flows. Collin stated that where voice can deliver value is where efficiency is valued. Collin mentioned that some scenarios come up that have to do with repetitiveness. Repetitiveness alone is not good enough but maybe having voice to come in and do things more efficiently. Collin’s viewpoint is that it’s not a specific part of the organization but rather looking at different industries or businesses where a lot of information is passed from one area to another.
Is the Ability to Scale and Do Really Ambitious Things on the Table for Speech Right Now?
Yes, Collin is confident that scaling depends on what people can dream of and adding more cloud capacity. Collin believes that scale is not the goal but rather to consider where voice can add value and then duplicating that process across the board.
How Did Collin Get the Nickname “The Operator”?
Collin mentioned that he likes to do different things and learns by doing things, even if he tends to overthink them.
How Long Has it Taken Speechly to Get to Where it Is Today?
Collin stated that a lot of times when you see voice technology tools, they are not built completely from scratch, and what is unique about Speechly is that our team is built by a handful of various machine learning PhDs. It’s from seeing problems and opportunities and the experiences that Speechly has been built.
What is Collin’s Best Advice for Companies Who Are Considering Jumping into Voice Tech?
Collin suggests that is it ok to start small. Before you decide on what your voice experience is going to be; realize that voice doesn’t have to mean only conversational voice assistant experience within Alexa or Google Assistant, but it can be so much more. It can be a voice interface in the web or mobile or even fundamental productized versions of speech such as note-taking.
Connect with Collin Borns
Visit Speechly website
Connect with Collin on LinkedIn
Follow Collin on Twitter
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