What’s the killer app for digital assistants - Issue #44

Before anything else let me start apologizing for missing last week’s issue that was not sent per usual every Thursday. I had one of the best moments of my personal life when I saw the snow for the first time. If you would like to know why that’s relevant for me, here’s the post I made about it. Hope you understand. More apologies are in order: I misspelled Marie Kondo’s name in the latest issue email subject, auch. 

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move to this week’s update. The voice app killer was subject of some debate this week after an article by Bloomberg, it is a very interesting subject, so I wrote a post with my thoughts in VoiceFirst Weekly, let me know what you think.

There was another interesting development this week: Bose is now a platform company. With the release of an SDK for their glasses and headphones users can now build applications for AR Audio. Don’t tell me that’s not big!

I’ll be moderating a panel at the upcoming SuperBot 2019 conference. Join me, you are still in time to register with code “mari” for a 25% discount of ticket price.

As always much ❤️.

Bose is no longer only the company that manufactures your favorite headphones, as of this week, Bose became a platform company when it announced at SxSW their Audio AR platform, including an SDK for developers and sample applications. EarPlay, who I have been following since I learned about them at last year’s Voice Summit made me aware of it since they are among the first companies who developed applications for the new Audio AR platform.

As you might remember I say constantly, in today’s world, developer attention is the currency for companies and being a platform is the best move companies are doing towards strategic digital growth. I believe in AR > VR, for the time being anyways, combined with audio can become really powerful, especially for companies like Bose that have headphones and glasses with sensors to track your movement or gyroscope that can enhance the user experience significantly.

Pandora Media has begun selling commercial time in streams playing just on Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers, opening a path for advertisers to target people as they use voice-activated assistants.

This is kind of gossip at this point, but interesting enough for me to bring it on anyways, a user reported ads in the responses received by Google Assistant.

Glia raises $20 million to unify voice, video, and chatbots to expand their omnichannel customer service platform that supports text, phone calls, video chat, and more.

This trend is only starting now, but omnichannel and multimodal will become the norm for reaching customers and brand interaction with their users.