During the 2018 IFV conference in Berlin last week, Amazon announced that Alexa has 50 000 skills worldwide, 20 000 devices and it’s used by 3500 brands. Big numbers, what does it tell us, though? Precisely last week, but before the announcement, I did an episode on voice space fragmentation. The main highlight relevant to...

Hello there, Happy Sunday! I hope you are having a nice, relaxing day. Earlier this week the Alexa team announced the availability of Contact and Motion Sensor APIs and Integration into Alexa. Why I think this is important? For the cases that are not being espclifically advertised for the feature: like physical impaired people improved...

 Among Microsoft announcements this week is a number of new features coming to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint that will use AI and machine learning technologies to manage and collaborate on content stored in those services. Starting “later this year,” Microsoft will be adding automated transcription to video and audio files stored in OneDrive...

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...