Today’s episode is different to other themes we talk here, which are more strategy driven. Today is about art, and how one artist sees speech, sound and communication. It’s a quote that stood with me, and I want to share it. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

I like the intersection of technology and art, and everything else. And in terms of voice-first Ursula Le Guin paints the best picture: “Sound is event. Speech, the most specifically human sound, and the most significant kind of sound, is never just scenery, it’s always event. This event of speech is the most potent form of entrainment we humans have and the intimate tango of speaking and listening is the stuff of great power and great magic. 

When you speak a word to a listener, the speaking is an act. And it is a mutual act: the listener’s listening enables the speaker’s speaking. It is a shared event, intersubjective: the listener and speaker entrain with each other.

The voice creates a sphere around it, which includes all its hearers: an intimate sphere or area, limited in both space and time.

Creation is an act. Action takes energy.

Sound is dynamic. Speech is dynamic — it is action. To act is to take power, to have power, to be powerful. Mutual communication between speakers and listeners is a powerful act. The power of each speaker is amplified, augmented, by the entrainment of the listeners. The strength of a community is amplified, augmented by its mutual entrainment in speech.

This is why utterance is magic. Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.

End of quote.

Bloomberg has recently published an article reporting some people close to Apple stated that the company is working on new AirPods with noise-cancellation and water resistance. Apple is trying to increase the range that AirPods can work away from an iPhone or iPad, one of the people said. They are not to be used for swimming: The water resistance is mainly to protect against rain and perspiration, the people said.

This could be a good strategy if what’s not been said in the article involved the AirPods with Siri integration. Hearables will have a big impact with voice, and it would be interesting to see how this plays out for them.

For an excellent discussion of what Apple’s master plan with Shortcuts and Siri we recommend the episode 12 of the Vector Podcast: Brian Roemmele on Siri Shortcuts. I think Brian vision of shortcuts as ontologies and intents is revealing and precocious. I completely agree that Apple needs more evangelists to carry their vision in a voice-first world. As Rene pointed out in the podcast: Companies are failing to see beyond of what they are to what they can become in voice-first.

The first challenge present is always gonna be bound by the platforms where you are building your app. For Amazon Alexa, one of the most discussed limits is the 90 seconds audio before prompting the user for a choice to be made. This kind of restrictions, will affect the design of your application and are challenges that might boost your creativity if used correctly. Constraints are fundamental in design. Know the ones each platform has upfront.

The second challenge when building voice apps is identifying yourself with your user. It might seem intuitive but remember that even when we designed personas for graphical interfaces, we can provide visual cues and restrict the user to our lists and our buttons. With voice is fundamental to connect with the user, as you will be effectively having a short-logical conversation with them.

The third challenge is establishing trust and discoverability. Despite both Amazon Alexa and Google teams user engagement and discovery of features is really low. Until users get on board in the platforms we won’t see this solved and until then brands and developers are figuring out on the way.

You might be thinking Mari, the biggest challenge smart speakers and assistant adoption have is privacy and security and you haven’t mention it. But John, that’s the biggest challenge that the field has as a whole right now. And I think users will care less about their privacy if the service is convenient enough. We need to figure out privacy as a field, not only for voice assistants. Other challenges include user authentication and this one for me I guess means more voice based authentication, cause otherwise you could send a token to user phone and authenticate them through their phone.

Thanks for listening. Before wrapping up this episode, I want to remind you that this a short show providing bits in the voice ecosystem. To access exclusive content and commentaries, please join our growing mailing list to get the ultimate weekly newsletter on voice apps. Go to voicefirstweekly.com and sign up there. And if you want to support this show, rate us on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you found this episode. Have a nice day, will talk tomorrow.

Hello there, hope you are having a good day. Today episode is dedicated to Cortana. I know what you are thinking: one we have never even talked about Cortana and two where’s Cortana?

I went ahead and looked at the list of featured skills in Cortana skills store, if store is the right word for it, how should we call it, the skills library? The store term comes from the app market where you effectively buy an app, should it be the same for skills?

Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked. Cortana has among their featured skills like tips on saving money, location reminder, check your email, send texts, etc. I was surprised not to see more skills directed at productivity. It would make a lot of sense for them to present themselves as the enterprise assistant, effectively repurposing Cortana as the workplace assistant more than a personal one. According to an article, the assistant is being redesigned to provide a more refine user experience for consumers, promoting a typing based-experience rather than a verbal one. This is being referred to as conversation canvas by Microsoft. The canvas is meant to be a thread with all you have said in the past. This is not news for Android phone users with Google Assistant since they already have this service for some time now. Microsoft will be looking to reposition it to other areas of Windows where it can become a more productivity-focused assistant rather than a personal one. The trail that left the lost of smartphone war can still be savored by the Redmond company. Having lost that war, Microsoft is struggling to position in the assistant space specially without a smart speaker.

Thanks for listening. Find the links referenced in this episode in voicefirstweekly.com searching flash briefing episode number.

Talk to you tomorrow!

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana/skills/featured

https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-repositioning-cortana-as-a-productivity-assistant-rather-than-a-personal-one

Hello there, hope you are having a good day, evening or the time you are listening to this. If you are a voice enthusiast, might that be a developer, designer, entrepreneur or an investor you should be aware of the events and conferences, to flourish ideas and connect with fellow voice first enthusiasts. In this episode we are bringing you the most important events in voice that you need to know. Disclaimer: we are not sponsored by or in association of any kind with any of the organizers of the conferences listed here.

Let’s start with:

VOICE Summit, will take place from July 23-26 in Newark, NJ. It’s 3 Day event with more than 1500 attendees, counting us too!! Featuring 175 sessions, you’ll need to plan accordingly for this one. And they still have tickets available. https://www.voicesummit.ai/

The Voice of Healthcare Summit will take place Tuesday August 7, 2018. If you are in voice and healthcare and wellbeing you should consider attending: https://www.vohsummit.com/

CES Las Vegas will surely be an important event in terms of devices unveiling with smart capabilities.

Conversational Commerce Organized by Opus Research is parsed in two areas, Intelligent Assistants and Intelligent Authentications. To take place in San Francisco in September 2018.

https://opusresearch.net/wordpress/2017/10/19/announcing-the-2018-conversational-commerce-conference-global-series/

Alexa Conference in Tennessee January

The Alexa Conference, presented By VoiceFirst.FM, is the annual gathering of Alexa developers and enthusiasts, and is one of the top independent voice-first technology events in the world. The 2019 conference takes place January 15-17 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and has been called “one of the best values in technology conferences in the world.”

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-2019-alexa-conference-presented-by-voicefirstfm-tickets-42352800366?aff=erelexpmlt

That’s all we have for the rest of 2018 and early 2019 in voice conferences. VoiceFirst Weekly will be in some of this events so if you want to connect hit me up on Twitter and we can grab coffee, or drinks, or both 🙂

You can find the links and ways to register to each one of these conferences at voicefirstweekly.com with episode number. We published all of the episodes note in a post so you have a reference of what we were commenting on.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow!