Out To #VoiceLunch!
The independent voice developer community needs to start working on custom voice interfaces outside of smart speaker platforms if they want to control their own destiny
One of the absolute best things about developing voice technology is the independent voice community. Industry events like Project Voice and Voice Summit are always filled with friendly, inviting people who are eager to share their successes (and failures) in the hopes of pushing this nascent voice industry forward. Since no one company in the independent voice community has had massive success yet, there is still an “all boats rise with the tide” ethos that propels collaboration. I’ve learned so much through my interactions with this community over the years and I’m grateful to be a part of it.
That’s one of the reasons I appreciate the effort Michal and Karol have made to keep the community together during the pandemic through their Voice Lunch meetups. Every week there are Zoom voice lunches across time zones that keep the global voice community together. If you are new to voice or just interested in getting insights from some of the best minds in voice technology, I highly recommend joining. And don’t be intimidated! It really is a welcoming community with no question too basic to be asked.
But here’s the thing…. I sometimes get a little depressed after these calls.
That’s because so much of Voice Lunch conversations are spent trying to figure out what Amazon or Google will do next that will impact their businesses. How can we work with them to make money? How can we work around them? What do you think they’ll do about X, Y or Z? It’s like the whole independent voice development community is in a cruel escape room hosted by Amazon and Google. As hosts, they only give a few clues on how to be successful in this game. Sometimes they arbitrarily change the rules of the game. Point is that we’re mostly in the dark on what will happen on their closed voice platform, thereby leaving our success or failure in their hands.
For example, take yesterday’s Voice Lunch topic on monetization. It was a group exercise in decoding marketplace dynamics and in-app purchase strategies that we have no control or input on. So was there representation from the dominant voice assistant platforms on the call full of voice developers to give insight or agree upon best practices? No one from Alexa or Google that I could tell. And of course no one from Apple. At least Roger Kibbe was there for Samsung, so at least one showed up to the party.
It’s depressing to see such great minds waste so much time guessing what these MegaTechCorps™ might or might not let them do with their businesses. If only there was another way…
Building a custom voice interface on mobile
One path to voice independence is building your own custom voice interfaces for your mobile and web properties. By using our tools for custom mobile voice interfaces, developers have the keys to leave the smart speaker escape room and speak directly to customers on properties they control. And as an independent tech platform, we’re here to serve the developer without the burden of also being a proprietary voice assistant.
Our principal engineer Noel Weichbrodt wrote a great post this week called “Today, we export to independence!” that you should read. In the post, he outlines the reasons developers should build custom voice assistants outside of the smart speaker ecosystem. He also references our origin story as a smart speaker developer and why it inspired us to build Spokestack:
We built Spokestack when we realized that NLU, ASR, and TTS on mobile platforms were all siloed between service providers, none of them considering the developer experience when creating complete,independent voice assistants. Not only that, all the service providers have business models that incentivize them to force everything to the cloud. So we built the Spokestack NLU service, using state of the art intent and slot TensorFlow machine learning that is familiar to Alexa and DialogFlow developers, capable of running entirely on the mobile device to deliver speedy, privacy-preserving results. Originally, Spokestack was just used in our own multi-modal, cross-platform independent voice assistants, but since January we’ve been focused on creating a simple way for all developers — mobile, voice, smart speaker, and front-end — to make their own independent voice assistants for mobile platforms.
Please read the post as it gives you a lot of great reasons why you should manage your own customer conversations with Spokestack. Maybe it will even inspire you to enter our “Export to Independence” contest! We would love that.
Mike
P.S. If you got this far, I’ll send a Spokestack t-shirt to the first five people who can tell me the album that inspired the title and the hero image of this post. Email me if you know! It was playing as I was writing this post, so it seemed appropriate to reference it.