California Dreamin'
Voice/AI takeaways from the ground: San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix
See the footer of this email for information on a voice/AI-related business for sale.
California dreaming, on such a winter's day…
A few voice/AI takeaways from the first leg of Project Voice: Coast to Coast:
We need companies working on travel and hospitality solutions that involve using voice to circumvent lines. There’s a big opportunity here. Airlines, rental car companies, and hotel chains all have laid people off, and won’t re-staff by the time a major new movement toward domestic travel kicks off. A well-positioned voice experience would be heavily used and would help keep people safer.
I’m hearing more and more about conversational AI companies getting involved in one-off education projects. There’s certainly going to be tremendous post-pandemic demand for radical education solutions, including a need for AI-driven matching of student with content, in order to try to get kids caught back up. I haven’t heard so much about voice in education since Alexa sprung on the scene years ago.
Out of 24 people I met with out here over the span of four days, just one spoke at CES, and the majority did not watch even one talk or live announcement. Among everyone, a lot of interest to get back to live events, though the timetable for returning varied widely among those I spoke with. Some are eager to be there for Project Voice 2021 in April, while others didn’t think they’d be venturing back out for industry events until Q3 at earliest.
The conversation started long before the events of last week, but the move toward independent voice assistants and independent conversational AI capabilities is on in a big way. As recently as 2018, if a mid-sized to large company wanted to get involved with voice, the most frequently observed path would be to create an Alexa skill, followed by porting that Alexa skill to Google Assistant and potentially Samsung Bixby, and then stepping back and weighing whether or not to either invest more into these major ecosystems, or go all-in on an independent voice/AI capability. That journey is now entirely reversed for companies I’m speaking with, where the bias now is more toward beginning the journey into voice/AI with an independent capability or experience, and then deciding whether or not to bring that experience over into the major voice assistant ecosystems down the road. This could be the subject of an entire book - it represents a sea change in the voice landscape, and is not political: liberals and conservatives view big tech roughly with the same level of skepticism.
I’ve begun to ask a wide range of people I’m meeting with whether they discern any difference between Alexa and Google Assistant, in terms of where to invest time, energy and resources. In other words: if you were going to create a voice experience today for a mainstream voice assistant, would you start with Google first? Or would you start with Amazon first? I’m getting widely divergent responses, which certainly points to what I think the real answer is.
Next week, Project Voice: Coast to Coast picks up in Florida for leg 2 of the 36-city tour. It’s been an energizing experience to meet with people in person, to say the least, and learn what you’ve been working on, and hearing what’s top of mind across the voice/AI landscape.
You remember what you’ve been missing all this time.
We’ve had some groups outdoors, such as the one above from San Francisco, and we’ve had some one-on-one meetings outdoors too, such as what we did in Los Angeles and Phoenix. We’re keeping it flexible. If you register, we’ll accommodate you, not the other way around.
Hope to see you along the way.
MULTIMODAL VOICE/AI BUSINESS FOR SALE: The original inventor of visual IVRs has created a new kind of phone call. This company’s technology enhances an ordinary call by joining a data session to it, positioning the experience between a standard phone call and a videoconference. Any company reliant on IVR communications, phonebots, and other similar technologies would find this company of interest, whether in healthcare, finance, or other verticals. If you’re interested in learning more, I’m happy to connect you to the company’s founders, who can share more about their story and why and to whom they’re looking to sell.
5,000 Directors of Innovation (and those with similar titles) from across the US and world will be invited to attend Voice Tech Innovation Week, Presented By Project Voice, taking place February 1-5. We’ll announce more about this on Monday. If interested in being part of it, reach out.