I Think Of Home
Voicify, Google, Voiceflow, Amazon, and Cerence round out a week of voice/AI news
When Snow Patrol released Reworked, an album consisting of re-made versions of previous songs, they surprised fans with a brand new tune called I Think Of Home, which tells the story of lead singer Gary Lightbody growing up in northern Ireland, and reflects on the suddenness of change.
An apt metaphor, as the conversational AI space now enters a new phase.
Voicify rolled out version 3.0 of their conversational AI toolset last week which allows individuals and organizations of various sizes to create conversational experiences and deploy them to major platforms.
There’s a marketplace with a variety of templates and other tools that can be used to make the process easier, and personalization is billed as a major new feature as well. It’s a substantial update and worth checking out.
Further, Voicify is doing a webinar on May 26 to dive deeper into their tooling and this massive new set of features they’ve rolled out. That link is here.
Google I/O took place this week, with a variety of announcements made about upcoming additions to the Google ecosystem.
An area I found of particular interest is Google continuing to work to integrate Google Assistant into Android mobile apps in meaningful and increasingly efficient ways. This article from Voicebot explores the use of “capabilities” to enable users to access key features of mobile apps through voice.
Voiceflow released an ebook this week called The Guide To Conversation Design, which contains six key principles for conversational experiences and features expertise from a number of well-known community experts.
Voiceflow has long been one of the best companies in the voice/AI space in cultivating community around its product, with content marketing playing an important role. This new digital book is free, and available here.
Amazon, earlier today, announced Alexa Live, a virtual event designed to provide new developments and information on the Alexa ecosystem.
The event is scheduled to take place July 21. From the website:
Alexa Live is an interactive, virtual event for Alexa skill builders, device makers, startups, and business leaders eager to learn about the future of AI and voice computing.
You can register for Alexa Live here.
We were thrilled to have Sanjay Dhawan, CEO of Cerence, be part of The Voice of the Car Summit West with us today at Club Auto Sport in San Jose, California.
With Nuance now off the market, having been acquired by Microsoft, a lot of eyes are on Cerence, which has made a habit of exceeding market expectations since spinning off from Nuance a bit over a year ago.
In a space with several companies that are excellent storytellers, Cerence has a particular knack for narrative.
To that end, the company recently rolled out a Vimeo portal, complete with numerous videos they’ve assembled on various aspects of what they do. Worth checking out and attempting to emulate for young companies in this space.
On Monday, I’ll share some insights from a recent interview I did with SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer, an important pioneer in the voice/AI space.
While numerous companies raise millions of dollars with ease today, SoundHound raised $100M years ago when it was almost unprecedented to do so. I spoke with Keyvan about that critical period of time, what was learned and what was gained, and will share some of that conversation.
See you then.
Music is the #1 use case for voice assistants. Why not create our own music festival, and tie the worlds together of music and conversational AI?
Who knew it would be one of the first music festivals taking place in the United States in 2021, coming out of a global pandemic?
We’ll have people flying in from all over for this, and if you are also traveling to Birmingham June 18-20 for Euphonious, let us know.
We’ll be connecting voice/AI executives to Southeast-based business leaders (who are buyers of conversational AI technology) and holding meetings prior to the music festival that weekend.
You will want to be at Project Voice X if you have anything to do with voice technology, conversational AI, or the brand new world of social audio.
Registration is open, and the exhibit hall now stands at two-thirds spoken for. Reach out if a potential sponsor or exhibitor.
We’ll be talking more about Project Voice X over the coming weeks.