Will.i.am backed startup presented Omega, their smart assistant at the recently finished Dreamforce conference. Omega is set to compete with Alexa and Google Assistant although heavy geared towards music fans: in the presentation the assistant was shown playing tracks at request, before providing information about the artist playing and any upcoming gigs or live performances. I mean, seems like Spotify for smart assistants. Given this music focus we can safely predict that is likely to find Omega built in in bluetooth wireless headphones. Speaking of which Microsoft unveiled several Surface devices among which are the Surface Headphones with Cortana (obviously) and automatic pause and play. The headphones are set to be available later this year. With Omega smart assistant and Microsoft own Surface headphones is the tell tale of companies capitalizing from voice technology, or at least fighting for a place in the consumers heart.

You see my friends, this voice space that might have been called a fad, it nothing like it. Look at the different angles of the ones coming to the space are and draw your own conclusions.

I’m Mari, your host for VoiceFirst Weekly daily briefing, you can find me on Twitter as @voicefirstlabs and on Instagram as @voicefirstweekly./ You have a great day and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Last week or earlier this week, the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee presented a project he has been working on in stealth mode: Solid, an open source project according to its author: “with the goal to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web”, is based in Linked Data and web annotation ontology. Anyways, why am I talking about this? In the FastCompany interview Lee referred to a voice assistant with the same principles, free, open source and decentralized. Its code name is Charlie, focusing on how people will own their own data. And goes along to explain how Charlie could be more useful on areas like health records, children’s school events or financial records. I talked here in an episode about smart assistant that are alternatives to the most popular ones backed by one of the big companies, among which was Snips, a smart assistant which differentiator is privacy built in.

Whether Tim Berners-Lee offering of a decentralized web will catch up or not time will tell. But also developers will tell.  Tim said that “Developers have always had a certain amount of revolutionary spirit” and this can be the opportunity to start something new and participate on a bigger mission for developers with an appeal for freedom and take control back from the web from corporations.

There are several aspects to be noted from the announcement, most of them are out of the scope of this podcast, for the topic we care, it’s really telling that when Tim decided to create a new platform for the web, it had voice from that start on in the strategy.

The intent is world domination

Said the WWW creator in a interview for FastCompany.

It seems that I keep missing Mondays the past two weekends! I have been traveling and it’s harder to find a quite place to record when you are traveling. As always, share this episodes and have a nice day. I’ll talk to you all tomorrow!

Amazon’s Alexa is getting smarter about sports — Just in time for the NFL season, Amazon has been stuffing Alexa full of sports knowledge. It can tell you the odds of the next NFL game and give you an update on your favorite teams. In the near future, Alexa will be able to give fantasy football fans updates on their players, and alert users when their teams are about to take the field.

Sports-related questions have become some of the most popular ones to ask Alexa in recent years, Jason Semine, principal product manager for sports information on Amazon’s Alexa team, said in an email.

Business Insider reports that the Alexa team has also been working to ensure that the intelligent assistant is able to respond to questions about sports events as they happen and to understand the context of particular inquiries.

“Our long-term goal is for Alexa to understand and be able to answer all questions, in all forms, from anywhere in the world.”

As you see, Amazon wants Alexa to be everywhere and to know everything. This is what having big goals means.

In recent weeks, Amazon has added a slew of new sports-related features to Alexa. Among them:

• Answers to an assortment of trivia-related questions relating to sports history, records and statistics.
• Updates on the latest injuries and transactions involving individual players or teams.
• Predictions on who will win upcoming games, including the latest betting line.

But more importantly, Amazon will be more and more in your home, inserting the need in your life to ask all types of questions to their smart assistant, emphasis in sportswhich unites (or divides) us, but certainly always requires some data in the conversation. Pretty smart if you ask me.

Happy Sunday, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

The same week Salesforce announced their Einstein voice assistant ahead of their annual gathering Dreamforce, Microsoft launched Cortana Skills Kit for the Enterprise for developers, to help businesses create custom voice apps for their employees and users, at Ignite, their annual gathering. This was expected, given the company strong stance on the enterprise. I have mentioned before that I see at this time Microsoft strategy in voice tech seems to be more focused on providing AI tools to developers, and again, you know what I’m gonna say developers are the currency for today’s platforms.
Cortana Skill Kit is currently available by invitation only. Invitations for companies and developers will be made available in the future.
According to a programme manager on Cortana’s team, the platform is powered by the Azure Bot Service and leverages Language Understanding from Azure Cognitive Services, allowing developers to create company-specific skills for Cortana using known and trusted tools.
As a proof of concept, IT developers at Microsoft used the enterprise platform to create an IT help desk skill that enables Cortana to file tickets for employees who are having computer problems and connect them to someone who can help.

I’m very passionate about the process of software development and how it affects the product cycle. I read a blog post about people with physical disabilities using voice tools to program, so I was excited when found this article about the influence of voice technology in software development. Let’s see some of the ways software development is being affected by voice.

• New development agencies are seeing clients request more and more voice capabilities, as well as old applications being upgraded with voice-activated functionality. But at the same time a bad interaction is worse than none at all. Lars Knoll, CTO at The Qt Company have said that “A badly done voice integration is probably leading to a worse user experience than not having one at all.”
• The other one is to have into account the differences between gui design and voice interface design. It will be increasingly needed that voice-oriented developers understand the basics of pattern recognition and machine learning. That being said, the underlying development principles remain pretty much the same, as well as having knowledge of popular programming languages. In a GUI, the user’s eyes and mouse movements have been trained over several years of behavior. As a result, voice development is as much a product design challenge as an engineering problem.
• The third way software development is affecting development is the fragmentation of voice platforms. You’ll need to make choices about developing independently for each platform (and your priorities) or taking more of a one-size-fits-all approach. I talked about it in the Voice Space Fragmentation (https://voicefirstweekly.com/flashbriefing/69/).
• B2B companies, can’t ignore voice work much longer. With Salesforce announcement of Einstein voice assistant to their platform, plus Microsoft Cortana Skill Kit, plus voice assistants being more pervasive in the home, cars and mobile of users, there is only so long before users start asking: can I do it with my voice?  or why I can’t do it with my voice? 

There is also an increment in development tools available to code by voice, in combination with the advancements of speech to text recognition, we can see a new wave of tools, where you can have voice commands as actions that use speech to text for the actual code input. The Nature magazine has an interesting article I recommend you check in full: Speaking in code, it outlines how programmers from the Genome Aggregation Database (gnomAD) at MIT, which is used to explore genomic data are using voice coding to build web applications. “These applications share data from some of the largest sequencing studies in the world”

Coding by voice command requires two kinds of software: a speech-recognition engine and a platform for voice coding. Dragon from Nuance, a speech-recognition software developer in Burlington, Massachusetts, is an advanced engine and is widely used for programming by voice, with Windows and Mac versions available. There is also VoiceCode and Caster, the latter free and open source. This tools are not new, there’s a video of PyCon in 2013, demonstrating voice command. However, reportedly, the learning process of voice coding has a steep curve. You have to learn all the commands which turns out are not that natural. And if you have any throat problem it can become a challenge as well.

On the bright side, users report to think through very well before dictating any code, and we can be sure is a big benefit.

Voice technologies are soon to be part of the development process and not only result of it.