It’s Thursday, newsletter day. Every Thursday, at 9:50 AM Pacific we deliver our weekly installment on voice technology. Subscribe to get content we don’t talk here, because it’s nature is longer or more thoughtful for the format of this episodes that are short. Here is wavenet E for you with a preview: Hi there, this...

Google announced the general availability of Cloud text to speech, new audio profiles that optimize sound for playback on different devices, enhancement to multichannel recognition and more. Actually, to show you how meta we run at VoiceFirst Weekly, starting yesterday Cloud text to speech will offer multilingual access to voices generated using WaveNet, a machine...

Hello, there! Welcome to VoiceFirst Weekly. Three or four years ago chatbots were set to be the Next Big Thing. It hasn’t been so, and according to a recent report by VentureBeat, tendency is moving towards the side of rule based chatbots, those that are build on a set of predefined rules, also referred as...

 Hello, happy Monday! Welcome to VoiceFirst Weekly! What you need to know to start your week in voice: First Shortwave, Google new experiment on audio According to a release by The Verge, Google is working in an experimental podcast app called Shortwave. The app was discovered by the trademark filing which describes it as...

As part of their believe that voice is the future, Amazon is expanding their Alexa Fellowship with a Fund for Investing in Student Scientists and Entrepreneurs. Amazon is not only betting on developers, but also in the academic community, supporting researchers at top universities focused on speech and language technologies. The initiative is divided in...

 Branding in voice needs to be respectful of the user. The key will be to bring branding in a way that is seamless to the user experience. You need to be careful about when to do branding in voice and know where to cut off. You don’t want to interrupt in the middle of...

Scott Huffman, Google Assistant VP of Engineering, wrote an article outlining the 5 insights of voice technology they have gathered since launching Google Assistant 2 years ago. Here they are, for you today, commented by me. Number 1. Voice is about action. Assistant queries are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than Search, with...

Two recent relevant news in smart devices. Saint Louis University is placing 2300 Echo dots in student living spaces. Saint Louis University has announced that it will be placing Amazon Echo Dot devices, powered by Alexa for Business, in every student residence hall room or student apartment on campus. While other colleges, like Arizona State...

The rumours/news of Facebook Messenger’s and Instagram voice input features plus Samsung Bixby announcement got me thinking about how quickly the voice space is diversifying. Currently at our company we are working with applications for Alexa, Google Home, a chatbot and we started experimenting with Bixby after being invited to develop capsules. And the only...

The big news of this morning and we’ll certainly be of the week is the rumors of a Facebook AI assistant. Jane Munchung Won, known for reverse engineering apps and uncovering features, reverse engineered the latest update of the Facebook app on Android and uncovered a feature called Aloha that she showed in a video...