Tiny Dancer
NVIDIA stockpiling voice/AI talent; voice assistants sound off on Super Bowl LVI: Bengals vs Rams
The legendary old grey whistle test was designed to predict what songs had potential to become hits.
If you play a song for someone unfamiliar with the tune, and they’re able to whistle the melody back to you after hearing it once or twice, it passes the test and is likely to go on and be successful. If not, it fails.
This concept was adapted into a famous British television show, and it was there where Elton John would perform Tiny Dancer live for the first time.
For all of Elton John’s drama, like all successful careers or anything else that’s enduring, it is built on rock-solid fundamentals: in this case, incredible musical talent and storytelling ability.
NVIDIA has hired of two of the longest-tenured voice/AI stars - Shyamala Prayaga and Paul Cutsinger - within mere weeks of each other.
Shyamala departed from Ford Motor Company after a five-year stint, where she played an integral role in shaping and eventually overseeing the company’s integration of voice technology into the vehicle.
Paul departed Amazon after nearly a decade in which the majority was spent successfully cultivating and growing the Alexa ecosystem, from the very earliest stages.
This isn’t going to be the end of NVIDIA’s hiring from among those with voice/AI experience. A quick search of open job requisitions on LinkedIn which include the term “conversational AI” yields 39 open positions at NVIDIA.
Compare these 39 open positions at NVIDIA, which have “conversational AI” in the job posting, to 1 at Intel (0 in the US) despite NVIDIA only having 18,000 employees compared to Intel’s 120,000 employees:
NVIDIA’s 39 open jobs involving conversational AI surpasses Google, which currently only has 23 worldwide despite having 150,000 total employees:
Wildly, NVIDIA’s 39 open job requisitions involving conversational AI represents a massive 2% of the total 1950 US open job requisitions on LinkedIn:
One clear takeaway from all this is NVIDIA values those with voice/AI skills and experience more than the rest of the market.
This means it’s not only a great place for those looking for employment (or, perhaps, for those looking for a change of scenery), it also means we have a meaningful differentiator by which to compare NVIDIA to its peers over the next 24-36 months.
No Tennessee Titans in the Super Bowl means I’ll be paying minimal attention on Sunday, but I thought it was worth asking Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby who they thought would win.
The results were interesting and documented in one of this week’s This Week In Voice Daily videos, which you can see here:
Finally, we announced the musical lineup this week for Euphonious 2, our annual music and technology festival.
Euphonious attracted attendees from 18 different US states (and 4 foreign countries) this past year, which certainly included voice/AI folks who either read this newsletter or who we otherwise work with. Tickets can be purchased here.
Alongside Verizon, The Washington Post, and National Geographic, who have already been announced as keynotes at April’s Project Voice 2022, we’re pleased to confirm Amazon as a Presenting Sponsor once again as well and will be uniquely involved. The event will be capped at 750 executives - you can register here.