The future of voice: the hyperlink for voice or inter-skill communication - Issue #46

It’s Thursday again, each week we publish a new issue. But that’s hasn’t been true for the last two weeks Mari? I hear you telling me in indifferent tone. I feel you.

Last week I had the pleasure of moderating The Future of Voice panel at the SuperBot 2019 conference with amazing folks from Google, NBA, Viacom and Earplay. If you didn’t notice on Twitter, it pick up interest. The panel explored future mediums and content types, where voice might be going in the future and the car was named as the next landmark for voice and audio innovations to break in.

Staying in the conference track, this week was Voice of the car conference, to which I couldn’t attend, but gauging from the reaction in social media it delivered to its promise. I’ll gather main takeaways from voice enthusiasts and practitioners I know that were there to talk about next week. One of the major announcements was voicefirst.tv, a new initiative by Score Publishing, same company that organizes VoiceFirst events like Alexa Conference and Voice of the car.

Finally, did you learn about the Bloomberg article of Amazon Alexa workers listening to what we tell Alexa? What are your thoughts? I’m not surprised in the slightest but it’s interesting to learn how other people see this.

As always, much ❤️ in your lives, work and families.

In case you haven’t heard the news, you can now create healthcare skills for Alexa. This is on one side expected and on the other, breaking news, a major development for the healthcare industry in the US. Amazon has been hinting its interest in the healthcare industry for some time now, and the questions will change for an industry where voice can be so fundamental. We are approaching that exact moment in time where companies will no be able to ignore voice without major consequences, even bigger than the costs of missed opportunity of the mobile era. Pretty exciting to watch.

ML Kit allow mobile app developers on both iOS and Android to benefit from the real-world uses of ML without needing to understand how the algorithm works. Google’s Firebase SDK for Machine Learning began with five APIs, namely, for text recognition, face detection, barcode scanning, image labeling and landmark recognition. And now, Google has announced that the API is expanding into Natural Language Processing (NLP) to include Language Identification and Smart Reply.

Interesting development for news consumption in Alexa, we talked about news consumption study a few months back, and the lack of skip and the very short formats were considered issues by surveyed users. This change address precisely that, let’s see to what extend it start changing behaviors, particularly for Alexa in the car.

Alexa now available in Brazil, Amazon is also entering emerging markets with full force. The next battle ground is those markets.

Attend the virtual Alexa Live Conference coming up May 2.