Just The Way
Algorithmic bias in AI, NPR on the future of news, and Google's support of Women in Voice
On the heels of International Women’s Day this past Monday, March being Women’s History Month, and Coast to Coast rolling into home turf Nashville, Tennessee tomorrow, it’s a good time to highlight what might be the hottest country music song in the Music City right now.
Timely, uplifting message of support and acceptance.
A few notes for the end of the week:
This newsletter is fortunate to be sponsored by DefinedCrowd, which has one of the most dynamic leaders in the conversational AI space, Daniela Braga. This week is a good time to remind people of her unique journey as a woman in AI, along with including an excellent interview she did previously on the vital topic of algorithmic bias in AI.
Ha-Hoa Hamano of NPR spoke this week, as part of Witlingo’s Lingofest, about the next phase of evolution for smart speakers and particularly how that will reconcile with reporting of news.
Women In Voice, whose mentoring program has grown over the past three years to include over 300 women, and whose Slack channel has nearly 100,000 messages exchanged which have enabled hundreds of job postings to be successfully circulated among this growing community, announced this week that Google has become the first platinum sponsor of the organization.
Google didn’t stop there, as they partnered with our friends at Capstone Publishing to bring Wonder Woman to Google Assistant in the form of interactive stories the family can enjoy.
Our friends at Audioburst put together a compelling compilation of inspirational, enlightening, and insightful bursts of audio featuring all manner of trailblazing women.
Finally, tomorrow on This Week In Voice Live (11 AM Eastern / 8 AM Pacific), we look forward to hosting the legendary Nolan Bushnell, along with his co-founder Zai Ortiz.
We’ll talk some news, interview them, and play a game with them and be out in 30 minutes. The link for the show is here. Hope to see you there.
Project Voice, as a physical conference, is returning in April as a CEO-level gathering of 100 top CEOs across the conversational AI landscape. Nolan Bushnell and Zai Ortiz will provide a brief keynote.
Tickets are sold out online, but if you’re the CEO of a company working with voice/AI and you’re reading this, we have a waitlist and we will attempt to accommodate you if you’d like to join us for what will be a seminal event for this young space.
Euphonious, one of the first music festivals to take place physically in the United States in June, is actually part of the Project Voice Series.
Why not, when the main use case of smart speakers and voice assistants (e.g. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Bixby) is to play and discover new music?
A significant percentage of attendees will travel into Birmingham, Alabama, just for this event. (You can register here, and the Spotify playlist for the festival is here.)
If you’re a This Week In Voice VIP reader and you’re one of them, reach out - we’ll invite you to be part of the Project Voice Regional Briefings in which top voice/AI companies will be connected with Fortune 1000 CEOs working in the Southeast United States.