In episode 6 of The Voicebot Podcast, our very own founder and CEO John Kelvie joins Bret Kinsella, editor of Voicebot.ai for a conversation about voice apps, voice diagnostics, and the future of voice.
As longtime acquaintances working in similar spaces for over a decade, listen in on this candid and intriguing recording between two industry experts.
Highlights include:
- Hear about John’s extensive background in mobile phone “voice” applications before voice was even cool (1:38)
- What John really thinks about the Amazon Echo (3:53)
- How Bespoken’s software suite fills the diagnostics needs of an emerging platform (12:00)
- The importance of professional skill building (24:00)
- A summary of John’s Diagnostics Manifesto and an intro to the 7 facets (28:27)
- How the combination of voice and artificial intelligence with texting and messaging is a natural next step in evolution – and more on the future of voice (42:58)
The technology behind Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, and Cortana have come a long way in the past 5 years, and consumers are embracing the platform with 4.2 million devices shipped in Q2 2017. The data we are seeing from the sheer quantity of skills shows a plethora of skills available – 20,000 is the most recent count for Alexa alone.
However, only a fraction of those are being enabled, used, and reviewed by consumers. As reported by Voicebot, there’s a general frustration in the voice dev community over the abundance of low quality and low usage skills for Alexa. And on the other end of the spectrum you’ll find over 1,000 skills with 5-star ratings and thousands of monthly users. This is where monitoring voice apps and voice diagnostics will play an essential role in shaping the future of voice – in both development and consumption.
To hear more of John’s thoughts on voice, artificial intelligence, and diagnostics, check out his appearances on Amazon’s Dave Isbitski’s Alexa Dev Chat Podcast and VoiceFirst.FM’s The Alexa Podcast.