We have several big company news ending the week. Apple hit the 1 trillion valuation, whoa, this was kind of expected to happen eventually but it’s big news. WhatsApp released their business API, this is following rumors between WhatsApp founders and Facebook highest executives over the platform monetization. But what I want to concentrate today is Snapchat.

Snapchat launched two days ago new lenses that respond to voice commands. Lenses are animations on top of your photos and videos in the snapchat mobile app. While the company has offered lenses that involve audio before, this is the first time it has created lenses that actually recognize words, then use its understanding of what was said as a marker that kicks off the lens animation. This is probably the biggest news out there this week, besides Apple valuation, Snapchat is entering the voice first world quietly but surely and they have a strong young audience leaning in to camera first and now voice first. I will be even more excited if they say that we can build applications or ‘lensations’, however they decide to call it. One of the things we listened the most in voice technology world is voice assistants and stats about adoption and competition between manufacturers, however, there are a lot of applications of voice technology that are not necessarily assistant driven and Snapchat is the first company showing the way on voice first out of the assistant. This is also a release that can help make voice commands and interaction more widespread and accepted. I think this is a trend to continue paying attention to. Have a nice weekend, we have an episode coming out tomorrow. Before wrapping up this episode, we sent yesterday this week newsletter, if you haven’t subscribe at voicefirstweekly.com. We have also made available these episodes in Alexa flash briefings in India, in Spotify and in Google Podcasts. You can find us everywhere!

Happy Friday and we’ll talk tomorrow