Transcript

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Bradley Metrock: [00:00:07] Hi and welcome to the very first episode of This Week in Voice - the weekly show that will examine all the news in this emerging exciting field of voice technology.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:00:20] We're pleased today to have three amazing guests. Ahmed Bouzid...Ahmed, say hello.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:00:27] Hello! Hello everyone.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:00:31] Ahmed is CEO of Witlingo. Witlingo is a B to B to C software as a service company focused on enabling companies of all sizes to launch and host highly usable value delivering voice experiences on far-field voice-first platforms, such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. Witlingo is a certified preferred partner with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:00:57] Our next guest is Mark Tucker. Mark, say hello.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:01:00] Hello!

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:01] Marc Tucker is an Alexa champion and co-organizer of both the Phoenix Alexa meetup and the Phoenix chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society and hopes that you will join with them each month to learn about and promote voice-first technology in Arizona. And even if you're not a local designer, developer, entrepreneur, or enthusiast, Mark would still like to connect with you on LinkedIn and his LinkedIn profile will be provided in the show notes of this podcast.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:28] Our third guest is Brian Roemmele. Brian, say hello.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:01:32] Hello!

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:35] Brian is a tech analyst researcher and entrepreneur and he just published issue number six of Multiplex magazine called The Enchanted Loom. He explores a new AI concept for voice-first systems called artificial understanding. Get the Read Multiplex app at the iOS store and subscribe for this and his entire catalog of magazines.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:55] Gentlemen thank you very much for setting the time aside to come on.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:59] My name is Bradley Metrock. I'm CEO of Score Publishing, a company based in Nashville, Tennessee. And with that, let's get to the news.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:02:11] So the very first story this week is the Echo Show. Now the Echo Show came out last week. But the reviews have been coming in. And most of them are positive, including one from CNBC that we note in the show notes.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:02:26] Ahmed, I'll start with you. What is your reception to the Echo Show, positive or negative, and where do you think Amazon's taking this thing?

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:02:38] So I am one of those people who is very skeptical about everything. So for example when the Tap came out, or before when I was at Amazon and we were launching the Tap, I was very skeptical of it. But like any other product we can't really judge it until you have it in front of your eyes, or you start using it. I was skeptical of the Show. I was thinking that it was going to be a step backwards where now that you can touch the screen that voice will take a second you know a secondary role. Received it last week - it's amazing. I love it. I love the fact that I'm able to do what the Echo does but also have the additional screen.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:03:21] I think we are, just myself, I'm just starting to explore it for real, and thinking of use cases and there are limits to our thinking and thinking is enhanced and helped when we have something in front of us. So my reaction really is I love the product. I think it's going to go very far. It's going to open up a whole new set of these cases of multi-modality. And I'm looking forward to having it be part of my daily life.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:03:49] I received the Echo Show the day before our last series of meet ups and took it to the meet up. And it got some good positive feedback from the people over there. I have a series of different devices. I have an Echo, a Dot, I had a Dash Wand and an Echo Show there and this particular venue had a network where you had to do credentials or at least click on the button when you redirected to the web page. None of the other Echo devices were able to connect, but the Echo Show actually brought up a web page where I could click the confirmation on the web page, and was able to use that, and demo that. So that was impressive. So looking at it from a developer perspective, I'm excited. Documentation's just barely coming out. It's definitely going to be a "voice first, screen second" platform. It's not a tablet that hooked on to the Show by any means, and in fact I watched a review on YouTube where the reviewer was giving it bad marks because it wasn't more of an interactive tablet experience. That's definitely not what Amazon's going for here.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:05:03] Well I've got to echo what Ahmed and Mark have said. You know, I've always thought of this as voice first, not voice only, and Echo Show is exactly the type of system that I ultimately think we're all going to be having but not necessarily with the screen tied in to the device. I've always thought of it as an ephemeral screen a situational screen that presents itself when it's needed and Echo Show is the first generation of that. And it is a wonderful product actually very robustly designed. I got inside of it and the speakers are very hefty. Extremely powerful amplifier - I think it beats the original Echo as far as sound quality and fidelity. The dynamic range, I would think, is slightly better but the power of the speaker especially in front of it is better than the original Echo. As far as the integration of the screen, I think there is going to be a learning curve especially for developers and even Amazon. I think a lot of people are sort of trying to understand: when do you use the screen? And are we just going to get lazy and not really use the voice interface? And I think that's what Ahmed was being skeptical about. And I think the conservatism that Amazon has had in this screen usage is I believe just the right balance. But I think in the future while you're talking you may wind up wanting to see some images in real time rather than waiting for it to complete. I guess that's the best way I can say it. And you know I have demonstrations of how I do that. I've been working on voice-first devices for a couple of decades so ephemeral screens are not new to me. That's only thing I was able to do because of the technology. So I'm hoping to see some of that come about. But I think it's a wonderful device and it's going to do exceedingly well in my view.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:07:02] Given the positive reviews across the board...put a number on it. From zero being "this is absolute garbage" to 10 being "this is the best possible product that Amazon...this is the best possible version of itself that Amazon could have released with the Echo Show." Each of you, give me a number, and Brian, you can start first.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:07:27] 7.5. And it has nothing to do with the quality or Amazon. It just has to do with where we are in the arc of development.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:07:38] Mark here. I'll go ahead and give it an 8. I'll give you an example: it was able to surprise me. Not only did I like having the lyrics show when I'm listening to music, but there's a cool feature - I don't know if you've tried it yet - you can hold a product like a bag of Cheetos to the Show and say "Alexa, buy this," and these sparkly things appear on the screen and, all of a sudden, it comes up with the product listing that you can purchase on Amazon.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:08:08] Yeah I think 7.5 or 8 is probably the right grade. Just to echo - we're going to be using the word 'echo' many times I guess, right? - is to echo the sentiments of both Brian and Mark. I think the product is rich enough for us at this point to understand that we are going to discover as we go along what to do with it which is what a great product is all about. If you don't know exactly the limits what you can do with it, unless you use it. And so because of that I think I think we are...this is an MVP, a minimum viable product. I think, for sure, this embodiment of the screen and speaker in one place is only the first iteration. I think we will definitely be living in a world later on where your voice is ubiquitous and also images and touches are ubiquitous so that you can freely in your normal life, as a three-dimensional human being, be able to call upon technology to help you in real-time. So you can go on with your three-dimensional life, as opposed to being trapped by a device or interface.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:09:16] You know I've got to circle back around. I fully believe what Ahmed, everything he's saying, perfect...Mark also. Mark brought up a really interesting point and I really think that the fundamental use case is going to be voice commerce for the Echo Show. There is absolutely no doubt it's a magical experience. Like Mark said you hold something up, it knows what it is, barcode especially, and boom, it's ready to go. And that's always been the hidden agenda with Amazon. It's also, if we get into it, Ali Baba - both companies very large e-commerce companies moving into voice commerce very efficiently. And finally you know I don't know if anybody got to try the video calling - the video calling feature.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:10:01] Yes I did.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:10:02] It's magical. You know we had dinner with grandma at the table and she's eating, we're eating. My kids are interacting. All I could say it was a magical experience and I could see it really dominating families that are separated. It really touches people.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:10:18] Yeah. Brian I did and that's actually why I give it a little bit higher score I think probably made it eight and a half or a 9. The video calling was phenomenal. I called my parents using it and it's very easy to see how you had this thing sitting on your desk in your office and you just tell it to call somebody and it calls. And yeah you know you could do it on your phone but it's just very underrated how great it is to have it be hands free. So that's story number one. And appreciate those perspectives on that.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:10:53] So I just want to say one last thing about that...

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:10:57] Sure.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:10:59] I haven't been able to do the calling feature on the Show, yet. I'm in this sub-class of people that doesn't have an Android phone or an iPhone. And, right now, that's what you need to be able to set up the Show. I guess I have a concern that there is a direction that maybe from Amazon that's going to require these certain things. There's different ways to set up the application - you can go through web, you can do it through a tablet or through a phone - and right now you have to have one of those two phones that I mentioned before, an iPhone or an Android phone, to even set up this. And so I'm thinking of people who don't have smartphones maybe parents or grandparents that you want to set this up for, and they don't have a smartphone. So there's a certain sub-class of people that can't use these features right now, and I'm not sure if it's a trend from Amazon or that the technology just hasn't caught up yet.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:11:59] Are you sure you can't do through a web browser?

 

Mark Tucker: [00:12:04] Yeah, I tried that - the option's not even there. So I've got a call out to an evangelist from Amazon that's going to be checking in for me, but I haven't heard back yet.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:12:17] I can tell you that that's that's already being worked on. The design, I think they overlooked a couple of things, and I think in the next iteration it won't be more than a software download where you'll just be able to drop in. It will detect the wi-fi, and you're ready to go.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:12:35] And Mark, I encountered that myself, where it surprised me that I needed to get my smartphone out. I was looking around, like, "is there some other way to do this?" And it didn't appear like there was. But it's good to know that they are working on that, which in my opinion, I agree with you, they should.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:12:51] The second story we've got is that Samsung is producing its own smart home speaker, powered by Bixby, which the Samsung's voice assistant. And since the third story we've got deals with Alexa, Brian, I'm gonna let you take this one first.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:13:09] Well thank you. Bixby is a interesting creation by Samsung. And a lot of people have made the mistake of thinking, when we look at Bixby, we're actually looking at Viv, and we aren't. And you know I feel kind of bad for the Viv team because a lot of what Bixby has presented thus far, and its implementations, have been not really taken as being a serious attempt to equal Siri or Google Assistant. Bixby was originally designed for primarily Korean language later on and few other Asian languages and really has not done extremely well with English, whereas Viv is a completely different platform. Now the question that remains is how quickly can the Bixby team assimilate what the Viv team has produced. I am not certain if that's going to take place in a very fast, you know, an accelerated way. The problem with Bixby I think ultimately is going to be when they move onto an independent platform, a voice-first platform, will it be compelling enough for people to want to move in that direction? I'm not convinced yet.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:14:32] I have seen some improvements in Bixby. I got to see some very early alpha tests, and they've gotten much further down the line. And I do like the fact that they're enriching and expanding the voice-first platforms. I mean it is radically expanded in 2017 and it's going to quadruple in 2018. So I think Bixby needs to be there. I think they need to hopefully integrate Viv in a much deeper way. But let's also shift to one other concept and that is the real reason why Samsung acquired Viv, and that is Samsung is looking at let's call it "voice-ifying" every thing that they make. And this is a radical departure in user interface. I believe it's going to be the best radical departure we've ever seen as humanity. I have appliances - I have a washer and dryer I really don't know how to use. And here's, Bradley, here's the thing that really is crazy. I bought these things because I had really sophisticated operating systems apparently. Really nice touch screens. They could do everything. But you just don't even want to do it. You kind of...the nerd of you says "yeah, let's do this." And then, it's like, just get me to clean white socks. The kids are walking in the streets with these socks! And so that's the subtext to all this is Bixby and Viv, in some form, is going to reach out to you through millions and millions of appliances, door locks, garbage cans, TVs, appliances, nuclear power plants. Let's not get those words wrong, right? Because they do have machinery that interacts with that. And most specifically, medical machinery. Samsung is working very aggressively for a number of medical operations to be performed purely by voice. And it sounds crazy until you see what somebody has to do in a medical environment to get something done manually. You'll see that it dramatically changes medical experiences. So they got to get this stuff wired and they've got to get it right. So it's good news, but it's just the beginning for Samsung.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:16:44] I just want to echo Brian's remarks and that I would be disappointed if what the iteration on that, and as far as voice-first would be an Echo-like device, meaning speaker that can talk to you from far away. One use case that I would love for somebody to solve, not that I watch a lot of TV, but television being able to just say I want to watch baseball and baseball shows up. I want to watch Nationals, or I want to watch something. Just that, and just make the remote control completely obsolete. I'd love for that use case to be solved. I think if there were to pick an MVP that would be an amazing MVP to pick, and solve the problem of the TV speaking. And so it nullifies the signal coming out and it's just like magic and it works. But again I think they would be..I think their assumption of Bixby would be hugely positive if it came up with something that is embedded within some device that exists in every home, whether it's a washing machine or what I think would be a compelling case especially in the United States where there are like four or five TVs on average per home is a smart TV they can speak with and that can do things like change the channel, turn off, or go to some you know some content that you're looking for.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:18:13] You know Ahmed, I got to echo in here. That's what Apple TV is trying to do. And that's what Siri and Apple have been working on and they haven't got gotten quite there yet. The latest iteration of Apple TV OS - tvOS - is getting close to the point where you can just name you know the ontology of what you're looking for...baseball, football, and...you can kind of get there. But you know Apple really needs to fix the remote. I mean it needs to be far-field, or you know, medium-field. And it needs to be on demand. But yeah that's going to fundamentally change all consumption. And that's a great use case. So I absolutely agree: if Samsung can do that, they're gonna change television.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:18:57] Yeah, a couple points that I thought of when I read this article is that Bixby was supposed to come out with the new Samsung phone and it's delayed. Amazon and Google has just made it easy. We just think "it's easy to go ahead and do a smart speaker." And I think the visibility of what Samsung is doing with Bixby is just showing us that it's actually difficult. We've kind of got a little bit spoiled with Amazon and Google.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:19:30] The other point that I wanted to make - this is something that Leor Grebler said in yesterday's VoiceFirst Roundtable - was that any new entrants are going to need to "wow" him. And I think that's kind of what it is with me. Go ahead, Samsung, wow me, but I don't know if this smart speaker's going to do it, but other products will probably do that.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:19:51] Mark I completely agree with that, and the only thing I have to add is that you know it's starting to get crowded for me. I already am hesitant as I look toward the HomePod coming out. You know I'm. let's be honest I'm probably going to have to buy that. I'm going to do it kind of angrily.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:20:12] Angry buy that! Angry buy it!

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:20:13] I know! I'll show them, right?

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:20:21] Yeah.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:20:21] But you know for anybody else, other than the "four horsemen" - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple - it better be phenomenal, so we'll see what they have for us.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:20:32] Bradley, I've got to ask...I am not being facetious about it, but as a researcher, why.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:20:38] Go ahead.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:20:39] Why feel that it's just another one? Do you feel like they're too many? Does that make you...on what level? I mean, is it an emotional level? Is it a financial level? All of those?

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:20:56] For most people, financial aspects of this are definitely going to be a limiting factor. And I think you'll see it with Apple. You know Amazon is going to make every effort to try to ruin the launch of the HomePod by expediting every possible feature for Alexa. And $350 is a lot of money - I don't care who you are - and so that will be interesting to watch.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:21:26] But for me personally, it's just a time slash attention span factor. It's "my God, do I really want to learn another one of these things?" And so there needs to be...we're reaching a point, we may not be there quite yet, because all of us are sort of on the vanguard here, but we're going to reach a point where there's just too many of these things competing for too little attention that the layman has to offer.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:21:56] You know, I hear you. I'm a little biased because I'm surrounded with 77 voice-first systems, many of them I made myself but some of them are experimental by stealth companies. Some of them are out obviously. And I've gotten to the point where I like the richness. Here's the way I see it: you're going to have your best friends, and then you're going to have the rest of the crowd, and some of the rest of the crowd may be your appliances and other things. You're going to be fine talking to them because you already know the operating system. It's called speaking. And you already know the arcane aspects of that. As these devices get more intelligent or as the OS's become more intelligent - it's what I talked about in the magazine this month, you know, artificial understanding - is artificial understanding, as I define it, it's kind of a new term anyway, is that you're really not going to know who you're talking to, ultimately. There are going to be many devices, and some of those devices will be preferential and execute on what you want and mediate on the backend who's going to respond and how they're going to get it done. And it sounds kind of crazy but really it comes down to resources and whether Google can answer a question better or maybe Amazon can answer that question better. So it's really this idea of a personal assistant that's going to stand between you and these voice-first speakers, because none of these speakers, these voice-first systems, none of them are personal assistants. Not even close. Siri's not even close, and they're the closest, and Amazon certainly isn't. And it has to do with context.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:23:36] I thought it was interesting that you said "learn another one of these." And that's what voice is supposed to promise, right? That we don't have to learn something new - we just talk. I guess it's still a reminder to us just how early we are in this world of voice-first. That we're still feeling like we have to learn the device, as opposed to the device adapting to us.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:24:03] Yeah I think, even though we think that this has gone mainstream, I think we're still living in a bubble. The vast majority of the people that I encounter in my daily life do not have an Echo, or have heard of it. Even people who are in the tech industry. So I think Apple does have a shot, big time, because most people who have an iPhone don't have an Echo, and don't have anything that's voice, and they'll just see it as a natural thing to buy the latest and greatest that Apple is offering. So I think by no means one should count Apple out, even though the price point is higher. But then again, you know, the people who buy iPhones and they buy watches - they are not very price sensitive. So I think next year I think the pie chart or the market share is going to look a little bit different. One should never underestimate Apple even though a lot of criticism has been leveraged or levied against them, in terms of innovation. So I think the map will be different next year, which is exciting. I think we need to have competition amongst the giants.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:25:10] I agree, Ahmed. I've been fortunate enough to actually hear the sound quality, and again, as an audiophile, I was stunned by the quality. A lot of people think in terms of music, right? But also think in terms of the fidelity of that voice and the ability for that voice to project and just how...in a sense it's a magical experience because a voice literally feels like it's coming out of the room. And especially the new Siri which is much more emotive, much more expressive type of voice where it sounds like it was built for the new HomePod. And obviously Apple is also playing upon the near-field and the far-field. Apple owns the near-field voice-first world. There's nobody else coming close to AirPods. And two years ago I was talking about Apple eliminating - well, actually, seven years ago - I was talk about Apple eliminating the 3.5 millimeter jack. And it was like "that's crazy! People are going to get mad." And what happened was once they got to understand the AirPod experience - and those of us who are cutting-edge, using it for voice-first - you never go back. Most of the things I write I dictate into AirPods. I mean, why do I need to type when I can walk around? I can jog. I mean, I wrote half the magazine while walking in the hills! I didn't type most of it. And you could tell by the way it looks cause I need an editor. But those functionalities you just can't give up. And Apple's got an advantage there.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:26:47] And Bradley, so I don't forget the thought...

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:26:50] Sure.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:26:51] One of these editions of the Roundtable, we can do maybe a section on the pluses and minuses of voice-first, because I think we're all champions...but I think it'd be useful to all of us to think about what is the minus of voice-first, because there are minuses.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:27:09] I'd be all in on that.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:27:11] To help us refine our thinking, as opposed to...I think right now I think it's great for us to be evangelists. We have to, to be able to push the field forward. But I think it would be good for us to think about what is the minus of...and one minus that I see, just to trigger the thinking for whatever next time we talk about this, is being cloistered. So walking around with these ear buds, and talking all the time, and living in your shell, so to speak. "The mind in its own place" kind of a thing, as opposed to being a thing that lives and interacts with the outside world. Anyway, just hopefully an idea that that will turn into something.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:27:52] I'm in complete agreement on that.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:27:54] I love it too. Yeah I think it's a great idea, because I hear people all the time talking about it.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:28:00] Yeah. And trust me there's plenty of people who tell me "what is this VoiceFirst.FM thing?" "How do you know this is going to stick?" Some variation of that question. And you know all the people in this podcast right now, we know that there's no turning back. But we also know that there's still a lot of hurdles in front of, in front of the sector, and it would be good to dissect those further.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:28:30] And one final thing: Brian, some of us are still very salty about the removal of the headphone jack. I won't name names but.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:28:43] I didn't do it!

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:28:44] You know, part of it too - and I don't mean open a can of worms here - but the AirPods communicate with each other with Bluetooth that passes through your brain. And said I'm not incredibly comfortable with that. And that's not the least, that's by far not the only reason, but it certainly has not gotten as much attention as it will when someone sues Apple for that, which absolutely will happen. So you know it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I think wireless is the future, but there's still some some ground yet to be settled with that too.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:29:21] Bradley, I got to say, you know, I'm an evangelist of technology but I'm also a study of where humans are going and how it is affecting us medically and psychologically like what Ahmed has been saying. And I can tell you that it is not a good thing to be surrounded by Wi-Fi 24 hours a day. It is not a good thing to have a Bluetooth device on your left or right arm and it's not a good thing to have Bluetooth or any type of cellular type of radio frequency going through your cranium because once it gets in there, through the ear canals, it literally reverberates inside your skull. Some of the frequencies, not all of them. The higher frequencies just pass through, and literally radiate you. We don't know what the impact will be and it might be very much like "nine out of ten doctors prefer Lucky Stripes." It might be that we look back in time and say "why were they so crazy to irradiate themselves with all these spectrum of frequencies? Didn't they know better?" And what I would say this, just because you brought it up, and I got to get on my soapbox about it.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:30:34] Go ahead.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:30:34] If you have young children and you have them in front of specifically cellular devices that are active cellular and they're in very early - and if pregnant women, absolutely - any of those early developmental moments where brain functionality is being you know formed is abundantly important to read up on the literature, to really understand that some of the studies were done by cellular companies, and to realize the model that they use was a military individual of 25 years old - their skull. They use those tests. Those tests are the defining tests for how cellular frequencies pass through the cranium. And you know that does not really match a developing fetus or a skull of a child that hasn't even been crystallized and formed. So there's a lot to be said about this and I see children when I'm outside - and again, I'm an evangelist of technology - and they have their kids with their phones up to their head listening to things talking or holding an active cellular phone for hours at a time. And it sort of breaks my heart cause you know we brought this technology about and we don't even know what the impacts are going to be. So that's my public service announcement.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:31:57] Yeah I completely agree with you and I think you know that's eloquently stated. I'll let that sort of stay. And yeah, I mean you're right, there's a lot more that has to be litigated and I mean literally and metaphorically but also you know there's a lot more that society has to find out about all this technology and it'll be interesting to watch as it happens. We'll continue to have a front row seat.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:32:23] I'm going to move on to story number three here, which is that Alexa has passed 15,000 skills, more than doubling since the beginning of the year. So I wrote about this myself earlier in the year that there seemed to be an exponential increase in what we're seeing with Alexa skills, and apparently we're still seeing it, because this was news this week. Mark, I'll start with you: what are your thoughts on the plethora of Alexa skills, and the growth that we're seeing?

 

Mark Tucker: [00:32:59] Yeah, that sounds good. Just a little bit about my background: I'm actually a fairly new comer to the Alexa platform. I haven't even hit my year mark. I've only been doing this for about 10 months now. Long background programming mostly Microsoft technologies. But when I started this ten months ago, there were 3000 skills, and you'd get a T-shirt if you if you were able to certify a skill and deliver it. And now just basically on average, we're getting about a thousand new skills a month. I'm excited for the fact that what it's telling me is that the platform is very approachable to developers, but there's a lot of novice skills up there, I guess to put it nicely. A lot of very basic skills that are out on the market. And if you're part of the Alexa Slack group - I encourage you to join if you're not - there's quite a bit of eye-rolling last month. In June was the first month where Amazon gets you a Dot if you certified, and this month, it's a Dot plus socks. So there's like I say, a bunch of eye-rolling...I'll quote somebody from the Slack group: it says "Yeah, twenty-five hundred free Dots means another twenty-five hundred hastily-written, narrow-focused, easily-certified minimal skills bloating the skill store. Anyone want to beta-test mine?"

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:34:32] Yikes.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:34:34] So there is a little bit of...on one side, I see it, because I think the novice skilled developer of today might just be the next brilliant skilled developer that pushes the platform. So, in a way, I'm excited to see so many developers joining. But I do see that there's going to be a problem with, you know, what do you do with all these skills?

 

Mark Tucker: [00:34:56] Yeah, I definitely agree. I think I think Amazon needs to move on from the numbers game. I think they made their...Amazon has made the point, or has validated the point, that there is energy and interest in voice. I think the next thing they need to do and they need to do this soon as possible is to enable people to monetize their skills. If you want to build a great skill, it is going to cost a lot of money. It's not a developer game. It is a product. It needs to be researched, needs to be designed, needs to be built, needs to be tested, needs to be beta-tested, needs to be launched and monitored and marketed and so forth, and it's...just like we know that there are companies that didn't in fact turn into unicorns when there was a model on how to make money and so forth using mobile apps, I think we need to move onto the next stage. I think continuing to promote numbers and saying "Now we have 20,000 skills, or 25,000 skills..." at some point it is going to be a game of diminishing returns where people are...when the narrative is going to change from "look at how many skills we have" to "look at how much junk we have out there." Here's a point that I want to make - the last point is this: I believe, if there was no skill store, I think the numbers (in terms of people purchasing Echo) would not change one iota. I think people are not buying these things because the skills, they're buying them for the 'out of the box.' So that should be something that Amazon should worry about. Are our 50,000 skills adding value? Are they compelling people to buy the Echo? Probably I'm wrong, in the sense I'm being extreme. There may be a couple of skills that are really compelling, but I really do believe that if we took the Alexa skill store and completely wiped it out, I think the impact on the purchase of Alexa would be minimal, and the adoption of Alexa would be minimal, so we need to move onto the next stage of enabling people to deliver high-quality experiences.

 

Mark Tucker: [00:36:56] Yeah, I agree with that, Ahmed. I like to play a game called "the brand game." If you were to pick some top, well-known brands, and then go look for them in the Alexa store, most of them, or maybe none of them, will be there. So for example, there's no Nike, or Adidas, no Pepsi or Coca-Cola, no McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, no Walgreens, Walmart, or Weight Watchers. So there's a lot of opportunity and I think that's going to be the next phase and it's going to require not just developers, but voice user interface designers and a whole slew of new talent that's not out there today.

 

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:37:38] If anybody from those brands is listening, please contact Witlingo, we'll take care of you.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:37:46] You know, my view on this...I start with the fundamental reality of all this. And you know - and I echo what Ahmed and Mark said, and Ahmed brought up it very eloquently - that you need monetization. But before monetization, you have to solve discovery. The biggest problem with every voice-first platform - and this will continue on until it's solved...and there are ways to solve it, there is about twenty-one ways, maybe twenty-seven if you really want to stretch it, that solves discovery. But I can tell you what does not solve discovery. What does that solve discovery is you having to go to a visual 'hardware' store to look at an icon using this old iOS app modality and then you somehow activate or download a skill or an app is fundamentally incorrect. It's fundamentally wrong. And the moment that that changes and becomes more human-like, is a moment that these devices will become orders of magnitude more powerful.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:38:47] I'll give a hint on one of them. We as humans build our skills as neurons. Neurons don't sit in a silo, isolated - otherwise we don't even know they exist. What neurons do is they interconnect and they interact with other neurons and they form of view of the world. And they form a view of a memory, and maybe there is an activation of that memory and maybe that memory is always active. It doesn't matter. But from a very simple context it's a neuron. Right now skills or apps are not neurons. They stand alone in their world, in their little sandbox, very much like a iOS app would be. And it's, I'm not being critical of the designers here. They are just using their old modalities and saying "OK, this is how we're going to do it." Follow me through, I'll be a little long on this. But if we build neurons - if we build use cases where these systems all interconnect, very much like the way the Internet does, but I don't want to get too iterative - then all of a sudden the value of each individual neuron is of course great, but the sum total is even greater.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:39:58] And now, discovery is also...does this app quote unquote exist...and then invocation. How do I remember how to get to it? This whole idea of using certain keywords to try to activate a skill is abundantly insane because there are only so many domain names or only so many ways that you're going to be able to you know take...there might be a kid that takes over the ability to activate Coke! And then Amazon might say "well, this is a better skill" or maybe Coke gets to own it. But after a while they're are going to be some generic quote unquote domain names, if you will, inside the Alexa lexicon that they're going to have a fork in the road. There's 9,000 skills that can be activated with it. And then after a while - I did a study on this - at current rate, in four years, basically you're going to run out of invocation words. You're going to...you're not going to have them. And then you've hit the hard wall. So the problem is fundamentally that there's not enough people like Ahmed, I include myself, and a few other people I know in the world that are sitting down and thinking this through, and saying "hold it. We've gotten here, this is great, we've proven that voice is going to work. But, oh my God, we've painted ourself in a corner. Let's tiptoe around the edges before we get our feet in red paint, and let's find a way to solve this." And this is a huge problem for everybody involved.

 

Brian Roemmele: [00:41:32] Some of the folks on the Viv team were looking at this. This is something I've been studying for the better part of the last 10 years. It's been keeping me up at night obviously as you can tell. So the answer is we literally have to rethink discovery, invocation, and then monetization. All these other things are irrelevant. I don't care if there's a hundred million skills...if you can't remember how to get to them, there's never going to be an invocation of them, and how do I find that they exist?

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