Mark Tucker: [00:31:32] Oh my God.

Bradley Metrock: [00:31:33] And starts spending money. And that's what Tim Cook, assuming he's still there, whoever it is, he's got to get the wallet out and get the student back.

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:31:43] It's a failing rich student.

Bradley Metrock: [00:31:45] Yeah, that's right. So yeah, it's a sad state of affairs but hey, what can you do?

Brian Roemmele: [00:31:53] If buying Shazam is their way back into the voice platform, it's all over. It's all over. I can tell them 20 companies they need to buy right now. Apple needs to buy companies. There's no doubt.

Bradley Metrock: [00:32:08] Yeah, I completely agree. We'll see what 2018 has in store for them. So next up is Google and Ahmed, I'm going to start with you. Your letter grade for them and thoughts on them?

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:32:22] I'm going to give them a B+, going into an A. This is mainly because I really am impressed by how much they have done in such a little amount of time. For sure, if you were to compare the number of Actions that are deployed versus number of Skills, and all that. I think they clearly do not match the numbers. But I think the number game that Amazon is playing is a number game. I'll ask you guys how many Skills you use on a regular basis. What is it, two, five? I don't use more than a couple. So besides that, I think they have done quite a good job in terms of their STK, in terms of their partner handling. I think Amazon is fantastic as well. But I think that given where they were at the end of 2016, and where they are end of 2017, I think they deserve the accolades.

Brian Roemmele: [00:33:14] Good points by that. You know, I have to give Google a B. It should be an A. But the reason they're a B is....we'll talk about this with Amazon, I've talked about it in prior shows. All these companies are basing things around skills and abilities. And anybody who has listened to me knows, that that is a dead end. There is no roadway. Go down that road a hundred miles an hour. I'm coming back. I'm telling everybody there's a dead end. Skills are not the future. The way this is all going to build is neuronal. It's going to be neuron connections, and that takes a complete rethinking of how all developer ecosystems are going to interface with these devices. Whether they do it the way I say it, or they experiment around with it, it's going to happen that way. There's no doubt about it. Why? There's only so much of so much of a domain space, there's only so many words you can use to invoke something. There's only so much Scratch Pad memory in the human mind to remember "OK, how do I ask it to do X or Y? Is it going to constantly suggest to me what I need to do?" This is not the answer, folks.

Brian Roemmele: Google had the opportunity to do that because they own a knowledge graph, and they're not doing it because of again a failure of leadership. They lost some incredibly powerful people this year in voice, and for a number of different reasons. And that's a big mark against that company. My view is this: Can Google recover? Absolutely. It's 2018 that time? It should be, and it better be. Because even though they have the biggest use case, they can very well be marginalized by Amazon to such a degree. And even Apple, and definitely Alibaba. There's no doubt about it that they can actually be a third player, or even a fourth player if Microsoft pushes it. And that's not the position Google should be at. If I had my way, I'd be connecting Google products and stitching these things together in a way that would be dynamic, that would show a future path for developers, because guess what? In 2018, there's going to be developer remorse on all these platforms. It's coming. You know how pro I am at this platform. But every day, all of us working around it, we're going to reach a level where it's not returning investor money. It's not producing what it should be producing. The sales aren't coming where they should be coming from. What happened? And what happened was discoverability, the proper monetization, and this whole idea of invocation.

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:35:41] I'm sorry. So just to engage Brian on this point, which is an important point. I don't think there is a solution that we can just draw up on the board. I think the solution will emerge as we do. As we do, which is what we're doing right now. We're doing, right. It's good that we have a platform when we have the thing called a Skill and the Skill is the thing that is a conversation. How does a Skill get invoked? Well that's a problem, right? A problem that needs to be solved. We have a paradigm right now that wouldn't solve it, but I don't think we need to do a paradigm shift. I don't think it's go a hundred miles down the street and come back. I think we are going to go down, and we're going to go left or right or up or down. But I think the solution is going to emerge as we define the problems in a concrete way, as opposed to drawing something up and saying, "Let's throw everything away and let's go and start from scratch."

Ahmed Bouzid: I think it will emerge dialectically, so to speak. As we engage with the real world. For example, discovery. How does one discover how to do something. Voice, right? Well voice or an interface that's voice, does not exist in the ether, right? It exists in a world, and that world can have signifiers, or things that tell you how to engage with the voice version of the experience. The website has its voice presence, and so does the mobile app, and so does this and that and the magazine has a mobile voice presence. And from those various points and channels, voice will have its place, and the invisibility of voice will be compensated a certain extent. All of that, all of this, is just brainstorming. And my point, my basic point is that we will figure it out and the only way that we figure out is by doing and acting and failing and so on. And we cannot act and fail without a starting point. I think this is where we are, and hopefully we'll get to the right solution as we engage.

Brian Roemmele: [00:37:47] I agree. And with that, you make a very solid point. I'm not against experimentation. I'm not against where we have come. All I'm saying is a company like Google, and that's why I'm basing this on Google. A company like Google has the opportunity to muster the AI talent and the knowledge graph in such a way that they can overcome some of these obstacles. Amazon is on the Skill paradigm. Google doesn't need to be in that sort of box, and of course, they're not fully in that box but they're heading in that direction slightly more and more. And I don't think that is the gravity we need to go in as developers and as people who are recommending....I talk to brands all the time, and they are flummoxed by this stuff. They know they need to be on these platforms. They know they need to somehow build their brand within these platforms. But they also know, logically, after being in technology....some of these folks have been in there for many, many decades, that there is a dead end. I talk to clients all the time they say, "Why aren't they seeing it?" I try to ring the bell.

Bradley Metrock: [00:38:51] Yeah, you make a good point, Brian, that the monetization that Amazon brought to the table this year really....it puts a clock on what Google's doing in sort of an interesting way. Either they've got to step up and offer those sorts of things so developers can get a return, or they've got to take an entirely different direction. And Mark, I want to shift to you, just to close this out with Google. Do you agree with what Brian and Ahmed are saying? What's your letter grade for Google and your thoughts?

Mark Tucker: [00:39:21] Yeah. So a couple quick comments before I give a letter grade for Google. I'm saying B+ , on the way to an A-minus. I think next year it's really going to be a battle for who's going to be the valedictorian here, Amazon or Google. To look at it a different way, our family sometimes watches the reality TV show Survivor, and the model for that show is outwit, outplay, outlast. And if outwit is the technical features, outplay is how you spin the marketing and the media, and outlast the long term strategy. I think Google's done a really good job of this last year outwitting and outplaying Amazon. But I think Amazon's up for the challenge.

Bradley Metrock: [00:40:06] I think that's great. It's great analysis all the way around. I think Google has had a particularly strong end of the year. The Walmart partnership, their advertising. I think they've made some strong affirmative steps in the right direction. And the analogy in my head is, Wile E. Coyote realizes there's an anvil about fall on his head, and he pulls out this little umbrella. (all laugh) He really does. And it provides no resistance whatsoever. Like in this case, Wile E. Coyote is the rest of the tech industry, and the anvil is Amazon.

Brian Roemmele: [00:40:45] Who's Roadrunner?

Bradley Metrock: [00:40:48] Good question I hadn't thought about that. You thought too far ahead.

Brian Roemmele: [00:40:50] Maybe Amazon is Roadrunner!

Bradley Metrock: [00:40:52] I think Amazon's the anvil about to drop on everybody's head. But the thing about it is that Google has done a good job. Google is in this strange situation of operating constantly in the shadow of Amazon. The deafening noise of Amazon in the marketplace. And Google has to try to cut through, and they haven't been completely drowned out heading in to 2018.

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:41:15] It reminds me of how they were able to just quietly takeover the market with Apple in terms of the market share. Right? Apple....and the Android is an open platform more or less. And right now there are more Android devices than, I believe, iPhones.

Bradley Metrock: [00:41:36] Sure. So to me I think you have to give Google a pretty high grade for withstanding the absolute relentless assault that Amazon has provided. I would give them an A -  if it were me. Because they are in pretty good shape heading into 2018. Let's close this part out. We're talking about Amazon, and Mark, I'm going to start with you. Your letter grade for Amazon and your thoughts.

Mark Tucker: [00:42:00] I think an A, maybe an A-minus. I think they're doing great things, overall. They're still the leader in this. There's a number of things on the developer side that I hope will be improved here this next year.

Bradley Metrock: [00:42:14] Like what?

Mark Tucker: [00:42:15] Well there's a number of features that I've been asked for, for a long time. Notifications have been slow coming out. I think it will finally come out next year. To do personalization, voice profiles, that is coming out. But there's a number of features like I personally have asked for simple things, like figuring out what time zone a request is coming from, and so that you can say good morning or good night. And that's just not part of it. And for some reason, it's so low on the list that it's not coming out.

Bradley Metrock: [00:42:43] OK. Good deal. Ahmed, your thoughts?

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:42:48] So if you had asked me in 2016, I would have said A+ because they took this thing called the Echo and made it mainstream, which is very hard to do, even for a company like Amazon. They delivered something amazing. And it just took off. And they single-handedly created a category. I do believe that if it were not for Amazon, we would not be where we are today. I mean, everything is contingent as well. And there was no reason whatsoever that such a thing as a far-field device would not emerge for the longest time. Somebody like me in the speech world forever. Speech is around the corner. There was a company called Nuance that just was not innovative, and it just killed the competition and so on, and sued companies that threatened its space and so on. So it took somebody like Amazon to come in and just do it, and leave somebody like Nuance in the dust. So I'm very glad and happy.

Ahmed Bouzid: And 2017....I think Amazon has done a fantastic job. But I think part of what has been driving them in 2017 is just this obsession with creating a narrative of domination. That they are the place to go. And they have done all kinds of things along those lines. For example, just pushing on Skills, going after numbers as opposed to quality. Getting all these devices out there with all these multiple form factors. Why? Why would you do that? They're creating many price points, and creating confusion in the market. But so I get people asking me, "What should I buy? A Dot, or that or that or a Dat? What do I buy?" I mean, we've seen this happen with Apple, and the post pre-shot, where there was confusion in the market because you had so many devices. And that's sort of the runs counter to Amazon's number one principle, which is customer obsession. You're not obsessed with the customers by creating confusion into what to buy. You're not obsessing with the customer. If you are not providing, if you're not using your resources to provide developers with what Mark was listing, those are basic things! They should have given us that a long time ago.

Ahmed Bouzid: For us to be able to build quality Skills. If you're not able to do an outbound notification. There's a whole world of value that is being kept from us because we don't have our notifications. Finally we're getting it, and so on. That's fantastic! Enabling of payments and so on, all that stuff speaks to quality, and they've taken a lot of their energies in doing strategy, right? Dominating and so on. And I'll leave you with this point, because I think it's an important point. Imagine, say five years from now, going into a hotel room and imagine that we now consider it to be part of our lives to speak to devices, to speakers. Imagine that it is expected for you to say, "X, what's the weather out tomorrow?" Or "What's on my calendar?" So imagine when you go to a hotel room this is what you expect to be able to do, just like you today, you go to a hotel room, and you expect to see a remote control. You expect a TV, you turn the TV on. You expect to see CNN and C-SPAN and so on and so forth. You expect that. Now imagine that world. Would you, as a user, feel that it's a good experience, when you get into that room to see that device is an Echo, so I'm going to say Alexa. Or that device is a Google. No! You would expect to be able to just engage it.

Ahmed Bouzid: Therefore, I think that this conception of somebody dominating....either Amazon is going to win. Everything that's out there that's voice enabled is Alexa, and that's it. It's the end. And it's one provider, which will be sad. Or I'm going to go to a world where we have sort of an open - voice web where there is convention or there's a way that you engage with devices. And just like when you go to a TV, and you turn it on, and you don't care if it's a Sony or if it's whatever it may be, and you don't care who the provider is, whether it's Comcast, you expect to see your CNN and all that. I think I'm going to go towards that world. And so this thing that's going on right now where, these people are playing these games and trying to dominate and all that, is really a little bit disappointing. And I don't know what the solution is. Is it going to be where we are going to go towards that vision of one unified interface and so forth, or somebody's going to dominate, or are we going to change our indication?

Bradley Metrock: [00:47:31] This entire thought process reminds me again of the publishing universe where you've had people for as long as I can possibly remember saying the same thing about the Kindle ecosystem versus the iBooks ecosystem to a much lesser degree, and in some other ecosystems saying, "Man, I wish I could download a digital book and have it readable on any device." You know, back in 2000, someone was probably saying that and I think that sort of has made me believe, as well as many other things, that the world sort of gravitates to closed ecosystems rather than open. I'm not saying it's right or wrong but it will be interesting to watch.

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:48:20] In the case of voice, because the voice is invisible and therefore you're not going to get the affordance to know what to do and what to say. So, for example, I think it's OK that we have a duopoly, when it comes to the OS and the mobile OS, because it's your device and you can configure it, and you live with it, and you know what it does. But when you get into a room, or a conference room, wherever it may be. You don't have that luxury of knowing what to say and what to do, and therefore I think the imperative to sort of have a common universal way of engaging with these devices is going to be more and more promising.

Bradley Metrock: [00:48:52] Well, you're right, you can't fully have....the smart speakers can't disappear into the ether, into the hardware, and the furniture, and electronics around you if you don't know who you're talking to here. So that is an interesting subplot to watch as this all evolves. Brian, what is your letter grade for Amazon and your thought process?

Brian Roemmele: [00:49:12] Well, first off, Ahmed made some incredible points, and I'm all for that. And I think all of the things are going to develop simultaneously. I know of a number of companies working on independent platforms. There's two stealth companies that are absolutely fascinating the world as they start getting some traction. Finally, some venture capitalists are beginning to see this. And finally, maybe some ICOs will fund some of these ideas that VCs were not supporting before. So 2018 is going to be very interesting on getting on. As far as a letter grade, I have to give Amazon a straight letter A. And primarily because this year they did bring about some form of monetization, and that took a lot of courage to do that. Now, why do I say courage? Because it really is shooting in the dark. It really is, "How do we get these developers to stay in the ecosystem? How do we get quality to go up?"

Brian Roemmele: And to Mark's point, we really, really need to work on making the tools phenomenally better. Not just a couple of things like time zones, and things like that. There's phenomenal things that can be done. And why is it so frickin' difficult to load things up and to get development done? This is ridiculous and whoever comes up with this idea to make the barrier too hard, so that the developer is serious enough, or technically savvy enough is absolutely not paying attention to where real creativity happened. Real creativity happened in the programming space, when people stopped doing machine coding, stopped doing assembly language, and started creating higher order languages. And when Xcode came out, people were saying, "This is a child's toy. This is too easy. You're making it too easy for app developers." You know, at the end of the day, one of the things that I hope I see all these companies do is bring these tools down to a level where anybody can develop on it. Now some people might feel like, "Oh boy, that'll open up less quality." Now I think what you wind up getting is more creativity. You'll start seeing things that we've never seen before. And the reason I say that is when the Macintosh first was delivered, one of Steve's things was to try to open it up so the graphics designers can start taking a controlling interest in its direction, and Ahmed has been a big champion of this idea, of creatives coming into this market. You do not have creatives when you have to go and try to prevision AWS to try to get an app to work.

Brian Roemmele: So that is something I lay on a team to not make it into another Kindle-type platform. And I think we can almost say they aren't with that Microsoft relationship, unless they already knew that it wasn't going to go anywhere. I think what we can learn is, what AOL did and what CompuServe did. When they opened up their email platforms to the greater Internet, they wanted their silos, but when they did that, it sparked a revolution. Now it de-emphasized AOL, because there was, again, failure of vision, failure of management. The AOL teams there, they owned the messenger service. In fact Twitter, the entire concept of Twitter was based on the away message. And so a lot of the things about legacy companies.... We got to be careful. We think that they might dominate, and if we went back in time, we would say, "Oh, AOL is going to own everything." In reality, they thought that. But what happened is, the world passed it by. And this could be true for Amazon, also. So I give Amazon high grades. They absolutely, like Ahmed said, defined this space they invented it, and you've got to give Jeff Bezos, I think, an A+, as an executive, to actually drive people to do this and to build one of the largest armies I've ever seen in technology, around one product. I mean, they're approaching 10,000 Army, just working on Alexa. Now, again, we're complaining about developer tools. Let's see what they do in 2018. I think we're going to start seeing some amazing things.

Bradley Metrock: [00:53:08] Well, they're certainly providing incredible market leadership. And it's been fun to watch them, and they're moving at a pace, that I've said before, I feel is historic. It's almost unprecedented. And they....I don't think there's a Voice First FM that has nearly the listenership that this network has without what they're doing. So I'm grateful for a lot of stuff that they're doing. They're trying new things. They're not afraid to fail in keeping up their blitzkrieg pace. So I would give them an A+. Actually, I'm going to give them an A. The reason I don't give them an A+....you know, Voice First FM was criticized for not having enough women on our shows, which is something that we rapidly moved to do something about when someone made that criticism, and it was very early on.

Bradley Metrock: But Amazon, and it's been written about, Amazon has a lot of women doing great work with the Alexa platform. We've tried repeatedly to get them on this network, and on this show, and other shows and we have gotten a lot of crickets chirping. So we would love to have Amazon express themselves a little bit more and share with us and the growing voice ecosystem their thoughts and philosophies on things. So hopefully in 2018, we can accomplish that. Outside of that one pretty minor criticism, they're providing a lot of leadership. They're doing a lot of great things. I'm looking forward to their 2018. We will move on and we will keep this as succinct as possible. I'm going to give each of the panel one minute to share each person's most exciting development of 2017. Their worst development, as far as voice is concerned, they're most disappointing development, and then the single most important story line. You've got 60 seconds to cover each of these three things. And Mark, I'm going to start with you. Hit me with your thoughts.

Mark Tucker: [00:55:09] OK, this is going to be fast. So I think some of the important things that happened in this 2017 was the Echo Show. I think it was a great device. We're showing that to a number of customers with demos, and almost 90 percent of the people that we show that to, when we go on to the development phase for their stuff, want to go ahead and do a presence with the Echo Show as well. So I think that's huge. Another one is Alexa For Business. I think that is going to be a game changer. I wouldn't be surprised that this is part of my storyline for next year. If we hear a storyline along the lines of Google Assistant goes to work. I think that's an important aspect, the enterprise, to hit. Worst development or most disappointing. I guess, personally, on the VoiceXP side, we went ahead and tried to roll out Black Friday and Cyber Monday ads. We didn't get a lot of good feedback in the marketplace from that. But now that monetization is in place, we're looking forward to a good next year with being able to sell products and services through the Alexa platform. So that's that's my summary for this year and next.

Bradley Metrock: [00:56:24] Excellent. Thank you for that. Ahmed, your thoughts with those three things?

Ahmed Bouzid: [00:56:30] Yeah. So I think the most exciting development this year is the Alexa For Business arrival. That's going to be definitely a game changer in taking Alexa to the office and beyond. I think the worst and most disappointing development this year is the Cortana-Alexa alliance. It's just makes no sense. The immediate effect that it had on a company like us was you just pause on developing Cortana skills. It made no sense. And I think the single most important storyline heading into 2018 is Apple pausing on their device. I think that is just a red flag. So we need to watch what happens at Apple's side in 2018, hopefully. And I believe they will recover but it's going to be interesting to see how they do it.

Bradley Metrock: [00:57:20] Excellent. Thank you for that. And Brian, your thoughts.

Brian Roemmele: [00:57:23] Well I'm going have to....the most exciting development is head-and-head on the Echo Show and monetization from Amazon. I think those are the most important aspects and they are equal in my view. And runner-up is going to be Viv coming into the marketplace beginning. Most disappointing thing of the year is most definitely Apple. Apple could have done a whole lot in 2017. So I'm looking forward to what they can do in 2018. 2018, I'm going to have to give it two things and that is voice and block chain merging. By the end part of 2018, we're going to see ways that the block chain and transactional systems and voice working together. I'm going to be the first to say it, a lot of people aren't thinking this direction but I can tell you things that I'm very close to are going to be approaching that and it's going to be phenomenal. The other thing is very much like what Mark brought up and I've talked about this for a very long time, seven years into this. It's when enterprise finally understands what voice means to productivity amongst employees, productivity around customers, and not a phone tree not a 1-800 type system. Real true AI, voice-driven AI, delivered to everybody's headset when they're around a retail space, or they're on the phone or other types of scenarios. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg, and I'm going to telegraph some of the things that I'm going to be doing that are related to that in 2018.

Mark Tucker: [00:58:56] I think for Alexa For Business....I know Amazon enjoys counting skills. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw headline Alexa For Business private skills hit 20,000 for 2018. I think a lot of developers are going to be able to jump in. I know VoiceXP is bracing themselves to be a leader in that aspect and are already meeting with customers and delivering this functionality to them. Even this week.

Brian Roemmele: [00:59:22] Yeah, I'm going to echo what Mark said. I sat down with, in August,....with five different enterprise companies, before it was announced that Amazon was going this direction, and they were already hitting the ground running to build incredible, incredible opportunities and applications inside these voice systems. And these are multi-million dollar scenarios. These are companies that are committing literally in one case maybe hundreds of millions of dollars into these contracts to get them done. So it's going to be huge, and monetization, the way it's going to be doing on the Amazon platform or the Google platform for enterprise, is going to be tricky. That's one of my biggest quagmires in working with these larger companies, is how they're going to try to make that work. What will solve those problems?

Bradley Metrock: [01:00:14] All of that is excellent analysis and I echo a lot of what you all said. I think the monetization is such a huge development, but it even goes a step further beyond that. It's the fact that Amazon showed the agility and the intelligence, the market intelligence to act on that. We've been beating that drum since the show...

Brian Roemmele: [01:00:39] The first show, Bradley! We said monetization and they did it! And I am really excited that Amazon moved so quickly.

Bradley Metrock: [01:00:47] And it's the fact that they can move quickly. But also, you've got to be listening. Do you know what I mean? If you're not listening, then it doesn't matter how quickly you move, if you don't know what direction to go in.

Brian Roemmele: [01:00:58] They definitely heard us.

Bradley Metrock: [01:01:01] I agree. I think they did. And I think that's very exciting to see a company able to listen to feedback, and then not necessarily accepted at face value, because there's a lot of context that we don't have, but to understand, and to have the wisdom. That's the correct word. The wisdom on what to do to lead the marketplace. I think that's the biggest development for me. Most disappointing? I completely agree. It's Apple. We've got Amazon and Google sort of chasing after Amazon's tail. And those two juggernauts doing their thing is creating such incredible market force. Imagine if you had a third competent juggernaut adding to that tailwind, it would add a lot to the market. It would move voice evolution even faster. I think it's disappointing that we have not been able to enjoy that so far. The biggest storyline I think is what VoiceFirst FM is about. It's showing this incredibly healthy ecosystem of all these different companies doing all these different things. Just like this garden of organizations and opportunities that have arisen, and it's so empowering, this voice-first movement, to enable entrepreneurs, and all the way up to the the biggest of big companies, to act in the marketplace in new and exciting and interesting ways. So I'm looking forward to seeing what all of y'all and everyone listening comes up with in 2018, and having people on VoiceFirst FM, and telling those stories. So thank you Brian, Ahmed, and Mark for this time today, as well as 20 episodes ago. I really appreciate it.

Mark Tucker: [01:02:54] Thank you Bradley.

Brian Roemmele: [01:02:56] Yeah, Bradley.

Ahmed Bouzid: [01:02:57] Happy holidays and a Happy New Year to everyone.

Bradley Metrock: [01:02:59] Absolutely. It's been a great year, 2018 holds an incredible amount of promise for the three of y'all, as well as for everyone listening, who's getting into voice. It's going to be exciting to see. For This Week In Voice. Thank you for listening. And until next season, beginning in January.