Every voice assistant needs three core components: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Text-to-Speech (TTS). We've already covered what Automatic Speech Recog…

This week's top stories:

Google’s Read Along 

Vernacular.ai raises $5.1 million led by Exfinity Ventures, Kalaari Capital

HR AI system, Paradox AI gets 40m funding for replacing the ‘boring’ jobs

Convers…

Music has been the top use case on smart speakers pretty much from the beginning. Having any song you like at your beckoning call makes playing music around the house easier than ever. And households…

Stories covered:

Talking elevators and the Scottish elevator sketch

Contact centre voice biometrics

Google Assistant's voice match

Facebook Chatbot, Blender, can talk about anything. See some sample dial…

Dustin and Kane are joined by Patricia Scanlon, CEO SoapBox Labs, to discuss how its specialist speech technology for kids is being used and scaled across the globe to help kids learn to read and mor…

Deborah Harrison was the very first writer on the Cortana team and defined the personality of Microsoft's digital assistant that is used on over 400m surfaces globally.

In this talk, we chat to Debora…

Voice search is growing. As smart speaker adoption increases and people use the voice assistants on their phones more and more, voice is playing an increasing role in more customer journeys.

But what'…

What is speech recognition and how does it work?

Automatics speech recognition (also known as ASR) is a suite of technology that takes audio signals containing speech, analysis it and converts it into…

Voice shopping on Alexa and Google Assistant smart speakers is a $2bn market today, and is forecast to explode. I've wrote about the potential of voice shopping for the Harvard Business Review last y…

Corona virus hits voice as Google removes coronavirus actions, Spotify looks like it's releasing a voice assistant and Jovo lets you build voice assistants everywhere.

Presented by Sparks

Sparks is a n…

The Food Network aims to the be Peloton of cooking with live video broadcasting on Alexa. Director of Technology and Emerging Platforms at Discovery Inc., Tim McElreath, joins us to share how.

Present…

Jon Bloom, Senior Conversation Designer at Google, joins us to share what a conversation designer does at Google, as well as some conversation design techniques used at Google, such as 'grounding str…

Maaike Coppens returns to share how you can go from zero to hero in one voice design sprint. From nothing at the beginning to a a validated use case and prototype at the end, with fun in the middle. 

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VaynerMedia are one of the leading global digital agencies. Director of Innovation at VaynerSmart, Claire Mitchell, joins us to share how VaynerMedia approach voice, as well as sharing some insights …

Ben McCulloch shares his take on why intonation and emotion is imperative in creating high quality and trust-building voice experiences.

Presented by Readspeaker

Readspeaker is a pioneering voice techn…

We catch up with 4 Amazon Alexa Champions to discuss the then, now and future of the Alexa skills ecosystem and the voice first community.

Presented by Readspeaker

Readspeaker is a pioneering voice tec…

Twilio is a magical tool, and Autopilot is its NLU platform that voice devs and designers need to check out. In this episode we're taking a look at what Autopilot is, what are its core concepts, and …

Adva Levin joins us to share why you should design personas for your voice apps, how you can create them, as well as how to work with voice acting talent.

Presented by Readspeaker

Readspeaker is a pion…

Sarah Andrew Wilson, Chief Content Officer at Matchbox.io, shares the secret sauce for creating the kind of Alexa skills you can build a business on.

In this episode:

This week, we speak to Sarah about…

The first episode of the new year is both a reflection on how far we've come in the last 12 months, and what to look forward to in the year to come. 

This is a special episode as it's the first of a n…