The Future is Spoken

Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Julie Daniel Davis about the Voice First Usecases for FinTecin Education.

A former accountant turned educator, Julie Daniel Davis enjoys thinking about innovative ways to enhance education and then making them happen. 15 years in the k12 setting, with the last role being Director of I...

Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Rana Gujral about the Voice First Usecases for FinTech.

Rana Gujral is an entrepreneur, speaker, investor, and CEO at Behavioral Signals, an enterprise software company that excels at distinguishing behavioral signals in speech data with its proprietary deep learning technology. ...

Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Bret Kinsella about the Current and Future Trends of Conversational AI.

Bret is the founder, CEO, and research director of Voicebot.ai. He was named commentator of the year by the Alexa Conference in 2019 and is widely cited in media and academic research as an authority on voice assi...

Hello and welcome to the 'Future is Spoken' produced by the digital assistant Academy. In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga speaks with Nicholas Sawka and Benjamin Falvo from Voice Spark about Voice Evangelism and testing.

Nicholas was recently brought on at Wanderword as their Chief Evangelist. Nick will represent Wanderword in the US in sales, networking, gathering product testers, and improving the use/onboarding o...

Empathy is the first step to design any product because it is a skill that allows us to understand and share the same feelings that others feel. Through Empathy, we can put ourselves in other people's shoes and connect with how they might be feeling about their problem, circumstance, or situation. When we design products with Empathy in mind, we are making them usable and helpful. 

In Today's episode, Shyamala Prayaga spea...

The Future is Spoken presents Ryan Elza as this week's guest. 

Ryan Elza is Vice President of Innovation and Technology at Volunteers of America National Services. Before that, Ryan was Social Entrepreneurship in Residence for Social Connectedness at AARP Foundation and led AARP Foundation's social isolation and digital inclusion work. He has an extensive background in the social determinants of health, design thinking and...

The Future is Spoken presents Matthew Hammersley as this week's guest. 

Matthew Hammersley is the Founder and CEO of the novel effect, which uses voice recognition combined with sound effects to enhance storytime for parents, teachers and children. Matt was previously a patent attorney for various companies. 

During his daughter's baby shower function, an idea for bringing new technology like voice recognition to the timele...

The Future is Spoken presents Susan and Scot Westwater as this week's guest. 

Susan and Scot Westwater are the husband-and-wife co-founders of Pragmatic Digital where they advise the world's most innovative brands that want to capitalize on the incredible opportunity Voice represents. Through their consultancy, Susan and Scot help clients solve their marketing and customer experiences problems using customer-centric approa...

The Future is Spoken presents Daniel Suissa and Ilana Meir as this week's guest. 

Ilana Meir is a Conversation Designer at Facebook Reality Labs. There, she works with a cross-functional team with AR/VR technologies, namely Oculus and Portal. Ilana approaches her work with a cultural lens: first seeking to understand the cultural underpinnings of behaviour in a space and then how a new product will affect them. For her contribu...

The Future is Spoken presents Jonathan Bloom as this week’s guest. 

Jonathan is a Senior Conversation Designer for Google, focusing on the Google Assistant. Jon was previously the UX Research Lead for Jibo, Inc., creators of the social robot of the same name. Jon was also Senior Voice User Interface Manager for Nuance Communications, where he sat on Nuance’s Innovation Steering Committee. Over his 20-year career, Jon has d...

The Future is Spoken presents Jon Stine as this week’s guest. 

Jon Stine is the Executive Director of The Open Voice Network (OVN), a non-profit global association dedicated to bringing the benefit of  standards to the world of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistance.  The OVN is a Directed Fund of The Linux Foundation. 

 He brings to this role more than 30 years of global leadership in the commerce and technology industries...

The Future is Spoken presents Jeff Adams as this week's guest. Jeff has been leading prominent speech & language technology research for more than 20 years. Until 2009, he worked at Nuance / Dragon, where he was responsible for developing and improving speech recognition for Nuance's "Dragon" dictation software. He presided over many of the critical improvements in the 1990s and 2000s that brought this techn...

The Future is Spoken presents Elaine Lee as this week's guest. 

Elaine Lee is a designer specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a focus on ethical AI. She's currently a Principal Product Designer at Twilio on the AI team, and previously led the design of eBay's AI-powered shopping assistant on Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant.

Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussin...

The Future is Spoken presents Rupal Patel as this week's guest. Rupal is the Founder and CEO of VocaliD, a voice Al company that creates unique synthetic voices. Unlike conventional methods, VocaliD's award-winning technology generates high-quality, natural-sounding voices within hours, not months. They leverage cutting-edge machine learning techniques, proprietary Voice blending algorithms, and our crowdsourced Voicebank...

The Future is Spoken presents Marco Pasqua as this week's guest. Marco is Co-founder of LIKE ventures and an award winning speaker and Entrepreneur.

Starting with their own experiences, they end up discussing the act of accessibility and inclusion in Voice Design.

Tune in Now!

 Conversation Highlights:

[00:02:11]: 2008 Lay off which lead to a career in Accessibility

• Learn Marco's journey from the video game industry to eva...

The Future is Spoken presents Maaike Coppens as this week's guest. Maaike is an international Conversation Design Expert, speaker and co-author of the Voice UX Workbook. With a successful background in linguistics and UX design, Maaike found conversational design the perfect blend.

Over the last couple of years, Maaike has worked with award-winning agencies, large enterprises, and innovative companies worldwide. Eager to be par...

The Future is Spoken presents Greg Bennett as this week’s guest. Greg is Conversation Design Principal at Salesforce, leading the company’s first dedicated Conversation Design practice since its inception. As a linguist, Greg focuses his work on empowering businesses to create chatbots that feel natural and helpful, build user trust, and meet customer expectations for conversational behavior. Greg works with Salesforce’s Product te...

"The Future is Spoken" presents Dr Maria Aretoulaki as this week's guest. Maria is a Voice First Veteran, having been designing Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) since 1996, long before Voice Assistants, but also before telephone self-service and Speech IVRs were mainstream. She got into Voice Design through a Post-Doc in Spoken Dialogue Management for Speech Recognition applications, after getting a PhD and an MSc in NLP...

The Future is Spoken presents Obaid Ahmed as this week's guest. Obaid is founder and CEO of Botmock, the leading chatbot design collaboration platform. Before Botmock, Obaid co-founded a design consultancy firm OAK where he led the technology and design teams to deliver over 400 projects. Today, Obaid concentrates on building on the success of Botmock to make it a real driver in building the next generation of conversational a...