Amazon announced yesterday that you can now request customer permission to access customer contact information using the Customer Profile API. Once a customer consents, you can access certain contact information in their customer profile, and use it to deliver a more personalized experience and provide additional information to your customers. For instance you could use the name to request a service and then send a confirmation to the user. You can also use text or email to provide additional information that’s not easily shared through voice. With contact information, skill builders can now request

• Full Name
• Given Name (First Name)
• Email Address
• Mobile Number

Requirements to use contact information

To use the contact information, skills must meet certain requirements, like having a privacy policy, it can not be a child-directed skill and it does not allow account linking in the background with the customer information. Amazon is showing its concern with privacy and user information. Restricting the contact information not be able to link the user in real life protects the user’s data.

Prior to this announcement, Alexa skills provided only account linking to get customer contact information, which introduced a lot of bumps and was avoided in general. The fact that skills can now access contact information can enhance skill experience and drive new use cases and skill engagement. You can now send follow up content or reminders through emails and text.

Google has had this feature with the emails for a while and Amazon is catching up to the features box of smart assistants.

Thank you for listening!

I met Heidi at the Voice Summit in Newark, she is the CEO of AskMarvee, an Alexa skills for elder care. Heidi gave one of the best talks that I attended in the conference. This weekend she tweeted that listening to a podcast with Brian Roemmele, about Siri shortcuts as jobs to be done, and she mapped that to cares to be given. And it got me thinking, it is possible that all this voice is about caring? Because our voices are instruments of care. You feel cared when your mom talk to you or a long time friend, when you hear their voices, and that’s because you have their voices fixed in your brain. I think this is a curious message for brands out there: Do u want your brand to trigger the emotional response that a friend trigger in you when you are in need of emotional support?
I don’t mean that the brand should be your dearest friend, I mean the trigger you want to be for the users of your brand. You want to be the way to go for your users where they think of toilet paper, or whatever your product or service is. Think about this, what are the cares to be given by your company? And for voice applications tailored to patient care, elder care, children development and learning, what are the cares to be given? Checkout today’s episode of Alexa in Canada where I talked to Teri Fisher about the future of voice technologies.

Thanks for listening and we’ll talk tomorrow

Hello there, I got asked some deal on voice summit how we put our flash briefing on Google Assistant. It’s not as straightforward as in Alexa, and it require some coding, but it can be done! So today’s episode is gonna be a little meta and we are gonna talk about the tools and processes we follow to produce VoiceFirst Weekly content. We basically have 2 mediums: writing and audio. We don’t do a lot of videos for now, except those we do from the episodes content, that might change in the future. It all started with a newsletter. The newsletter is a curation of what we consider worth sharing in voice technologies every week. It’s content curation. The amazing Nersa has set up an automated process to send to an Excel file all the tweets with the hashtags we are interested in. This Excel file gets pretty big pretty fast, but most of it are retweets and cited tweets. Then I come in and read the most relevant ones, read the articles and make the selection for what makes the newsletter that week. Nersa reviews them and so forth and so on. For our audio content the strategy is a little different, as this shows are produced daily. We try to not say the same in the podcast as in the newsletter, and most of the time we succeed. The format of the show is intended to be short-sized episodes of ~2-3 minutes, always under 5, as I suspect you know by now. The approach for these is different. Once a week we gather the themes we want to feature in the week and based on that I write the commentaries. Say we decided to talk about retail and voice commerce, and 6 themes more. We then proceed to write an outline of what we want and then we go and refine it. The other thing we do is as we read Twitter or Instagram, we gather question that people ask and decide if we want to give our 2 cents on them. We write every podcast episode no matter how short, that way the transcript is already there, and we can make videos, tweets, more content. We mainly published everything in our website and in social networks.
Basically that’s our processes, I’m sure everyone of you have a different process to come up with content, share it with us if you like, or let us know if this was useful or we can help you in any way with yours.
Thank you for listening!

Hello happy Sunday,

What a week this was for the voice fam. Voice Summit wrapped up on Thursday and it was an amazing experience. The talks as well as meeting the leading voices in voice, pun intended. And putting faces to the twitter handles and tweets. Let me tell you, it’s an amazing family. I feel so grateful to have met them. As happens when you have a lot of enlightening conversations, I’m back full of ideas, new projects and collaborations. Stay tuned for new great things to come! The most immediate one I talk to Teri Fisher, host of Alexa in Canada podcast. He did this Voice summit special episode where each person he interviewed gave a his 1 minute view on the future of voice applications. He just announced on Twitter that the episode should be out soon. I also talked with VUX.world podcast so stay tuned for that as well.

I also met with some of the guy from the Voice Entrepreneur community and we had so much fun along with learning. Can’t wait to be with this guys again! Sending you all lots of love.

Thank you for listening

There is gonna be a voice app for everything. Alexa has a wine skill that helps you pair wines with food. Just say

 “Alexa, ask wine pairing which wine goes best with lamb”