You might have heard me say that voice platforms are the platform for creatives. Then last week after Amazon announcement of 50 000 skills I did an episode basically laying out the work Amazon Alexa team is doing with its developer evangelists has being in my opinion instrumental for those numbers. So can you make up your mind already? Is it creatives or developers? Short answer both. Longer answer, it’s about timing. Right now as platforms, you want to drive as many people as possible to your environment to build applications. It doesn’t matter if most of those applications are fart apps, what matters is the visibility and exposure to other developers. Listen, developers like to play with new stuff, I’m speaking for a friend. A lot of developers are early adopters of technology and they bring others with them. So in this stage, what this platforms should look for is the more developers creating for them. However, the best voice applications are about the conversation and the humans in it. And that’s when you need the scriptwriters, the creatives, the sound engineers, the musicians. Especially for voice games, that are looking for engagement.

Zach Johnson, founder of Xandra the conversation design company behind Hollywood Alexa skills like Westworld, said in an exclusive interview with Variety that when he had to hire staffers for a startup to build bots and other conversational experiences, he didn’t tap into Silicon Valley’s developer community.

He made use of the fact that the underlying technology was being built by big tech companies with deep pockets, and hired playwrights, actors, and musicians — creatives who knew how to tell a story.

The underlying technology is there. The important part is to tell a story.

Thank you for listening, thank you for staying with us and make grow the listeners. I’m going to do an episode answering your questions! Send them to mari@voicefirstweekly.com or in Twitter direct messages to @voicefirstlabs.
Have a great day and we’ll talk tomorrow!

Hello, happy Sunday.
Last week Ben Smith from Voice Entrepreneur asked on Instagram: Will Voice Technology be polluted with ads? 

My response was: Our ears are way more sensitive than our eyes. If you open lots of pages with ads today and imagine that with voice it’s unbearable. That’s why ads in voice will be different and the field has to be smarter on voice platforms. And that’s why branding made right it’s gonna be so important and hard for voice platforms.
I mentioned in the episode about why branding in voice is a necessary challenge a quote that said voice is going to be the biggest challenge for brands since the internet.
What do you think? I woke up like this!

Have a nice Sunday and a productive start of week, we’ll talk tomorrow!

Do you know how Alexa and Siri decides which website to pull when they are asked a question?
Researches from digital strategy agency iProspect shine their opinion on how it works according to a study they conducted, The Future is voice activated.
This are the items they mentioned a website should have to be chosen by the smart assistants Alexa and Siri:
The first one is that the site must be popular online already. For now it seems that being popular keeps giving and giving.
The site should have a solid reputation. The quality of smart assistants answers it’s very important for the platforms to have authority and avoid user turnover for bad responses. Sites should have reputable links.
The site’s optimized for conversational queries. Better be prepared to respond to longer queries in conversational format. One of the first steps you can take it’s implement schema in your pages. Google has some documentation on how to do it and the website is schema.org.

It loads quickly. Conversations have this immediacy, people are expecting responses faster than traditional web pages, where there is usually visual cue on the loading process. If your site content doesn’t change often, cache it. Be careful, as Phil Karlton said:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

Wanted to put this quote there today.

Last one is The site’s content is the same language the user speaks.
We don’t know for sure how Alexa or Siri picks a website to pull. Definitely this is a nice guidelines either way for your sites. Note that in this list, the biggest change is optimization for conversational queries and there is nothing about ranking being said, but surely there has to be some kind of way to prioritize websites, but also skills and actions. As we move towards a more voice activated world, it will become increasingly important to have content optimized for voiced queries.
Find the study in the episode notes at voicefirstweekly.com/flashbriefing/86.

Thank you for listening. What topics would you like to see featured more? Spread the love and subscribe. Feeling excited every day more. You have a great day, and we’ll talk tomorrow!

Amazon AWS:

Amazon Machine learning services have a pricing model of pay as you use and provides the typical scalability AWS services are known for. The heaviest marketing it has is that it’s the same service that powers Alexa.

• Amazon Lex, for conversational interfaces and bots development automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text.
• Amazon Polly is a speech to text service to synthesize speech. Multiple languages and voices to choose from. I have made some demos for Amazon Polly and I like that you can download the audio or stream it directly to S3 from the webpage, without even calling the API. Useful for voice apps. The free tier includes 1 million characters per month,
• Amazon Rekognition, with a k.https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/?nc2=h_a1 Identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as detect any inappropriate content. Files to analyze has to be in S3, obviously.
• Amazon translate https://aws.amazon.com/translate/?p=tile .Translation services. The advertize use case is a curious one at least to me Enable multilingual sentiment analysis of social media content
• Amazon transcribe provides automatic speech recognition from audio or video in common formats. Transcribe service calls. The service generates the timestamp in the text which can be really useful for captioning and subtitles. You can even try it on the go (https://console.aws.amazon.com/transcribe/home?region=us-east-1#createJob)

Google Speech and text processing services and APIs

• Cloud Natural Language API provides text analysis. The thing Google can take advantage of it can recognize as entities companies, consumer goods like phones, locations https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/
• Cloud speech API Speech to text recognition the strong point of Google is that it recognizes 120 languages. It’s separated by model like command and search, phone calls and video. Models optimize for cases like video for transcription as Youtube provides. https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/
• Cloud translation API https://cloud.google.com/translate/

The winner: There is no winner, there never is, I went two episodes to show you trade offs, choose accordingly. Do you need 100 languages, choose Google, do you need content moderation, Microsoft services, do you have other applications with AWS services like S3 etc, then choose Amazon. Above all, I choose whatever the team is more experienced on if the deliverable is soon.

Pricing varies per service and I encourage to evaluate before choosing one service.

Other comparisons

I didn’t include IBM Watson in this one, so I’ll leave other comparisons that might be useful, it includes IBM Watson that I decided not to explore:

https://softarex.com/blog/cloud-cognitive-services-analysis/
https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/datascience/comparing-machine-learning-as-a-service-amazon-microsoft-azure-google-cloud-ai-ibm-watson/