Transcript:

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:00:10] Hi and welcome back to This Week In Voice for Season 2. It's a brand new season and I'm really excited about it. The show was very well-received last year, our first year doing it. We're bringing it back. Not a surprise to anybody and we're very grateful for everybody who has listened to the show in 2017, everyone who is going to listen to it this year and shared feedback with us, sent us messages, engaged with us on Twitter and on social media. Thank you very much for that. Our sponsor for This Week In Voice is VoiceXP and instead of reading a spiel, I just want to take a minute to thank personally the crew of VoiceXP and specifically Bob Stolzberg. This guy is a pioneer in voice technology. VoiceXP has carved out a real niche for itself in the Midwest. They're doing incredible work creating Alexa skills, Google Home action and really educating the market in many ways on the power of voice technology. I'm inspired by their work. I'm honored that they've been a sponsor of VoiceFirst.FM to this point and looking forward to working with them into the future. So I wanted to take a moment off the cuff and just thank them for everything.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:35] Our guests today are Tim Kahle and Dominik Meissner, both of 169 Labs. Gentlemen say hello.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:01:44] Hi Bradley.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:01:45] Hi Bradley, how are you doing?

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:01:47] I'm doing great guys, thank you very much for joining us today. If one of y'all would take a moment and share with me and the audience what does 169 Labs do.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:01:59] First of all thank you Bradley. We are honored to be part of the first episode of This Week In Voice for this year. We've been following the podcasts of VoiceFirst.FM over the last year and really enjoyed it, a lot of inspiration and great guests. I listened to my very first episode during a train ride I think from Cologne to Berlin here in Germany and it was one episode of The Voice of Healthcare.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:02:33] Yeah, great source of information.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:02:35] I appreciate that, thank you very much.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:02:37] Yeah, and now we are part of the podcast, that's awesome. Dominik and I run an agency here in Germany with a strong focus on the voice ecosystem. Companies are asking us for a consultation on their existing voice apps or book us to build their skills, including UX conception, marketing recommendations, etc. We do workshops and talks and are asked to join Hackathon as mentors and are now co-host of The Voice Meetup in Cologne. We do a lot of things regarding the voice first world and now we're part of your podcasts.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:03:25] That is awesome.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:03:31] It's really great and we are honored to attend the Alexa Conference next week.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:03:37] Absolutely, yes we're pleased to have you today and pleased to have you as part of the Alexa Conference where y'all will be giving a briefing on Alexa adoption in Germany and across Europe. It's going to be fantastic information for people to get no matter where they're coming from. Everyone wants to know how Alexa is being adopted in Europe and just to get y'all perspective, firsthand perspective on that would be a beautiful thing.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:04:06] Thank both of you very much for joining us. So with that, we'll get to the news. This week almost all of the airtime, all of the attention is going to see the Consumer Electronics Show going on out in Las Vegas. I wanted to select a couple of key stories that we've already seen emerge out of the Conference and discuss those and then sort of talk about how y'all see some of these announcements shaping the rest of the year, but let's start with the first one. Google for a long time has not participated that much in CES according to stuff that I've read. They haven't had a booth. This year they have a booth. They haven't advertised that much this year, they're advertising everywhere for Google Assistant and Dominik, I'll start with you. Do you think that Google is spending their money wisely here, do you think that that smart of them to compete and take on Amazon head to head in a major show like CES? Share with me your perspective on seeing what they're doing.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:05:25] Yeah, actually I think they have a lot of space to keep up and match the efforts of Amazon in the market of the voice services. I think they had a head to head start, but Amazon just put them behind them. So they need to catch up a lot in markets to get more people using their services. I think it's the right move to go to any trade show to keep the relationships with customers, to get more people into the devices.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:10:43] So you like move?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:10:44] I think it's a bold move doing it, and I think it's a good move to do it at CES. It's really a commerce focused industry, all news come out of there, everybody is there, the press is there, and people are there. I think it's a good move going there and presenting all that stuff there. Yeah, that's a good show for them.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:11:00] They've gotten a lot of attention just for the simple fact that they're advertising everywhere, they look for every nook and cranny available and stuff their logo in it or something about Google Assistant. I agree with you. I don't think that's a bad move either considering how Amazon, that's a page out of their playbook. They're the ones who have been advertising heavily, they're the ones who have been promoting and educating the market a little bit more over 2017.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:11:25] The other story that sort of is part of this is the major story I've seen about Google coming out to CES so far is they have announced a group of Echo Show competitors. They've got a group of hardware offerings that use Google Assistant deeply, but that also have a screen. Have you had a chance to see some of those devices, was there one in particular that stood out to you? What excites you the most about seeing Google get multimodal with their Google Assistant?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:11:56] I would have been surprised if they hadn't announced a device to put them on screen. So at least now we know why Google removed YouTube from Amazon Echo Show and Fire TV Stick. So to be honest, I like the tablet style design of the Lenovo Smart Display. I've seen it in the press and the different blogs and I wondered why Amazon decided to give the Echo Show the look of, I don't know if you remember the very first real projection TVs. The design of the Smart Display for example from Lenovo is a bit thinner and looks more like a tablet. So I love the design and I think it's absolutely the right move to bring a device with a screen. After Amazon did this, I think in May last year in the U.S. and in November in Germany, so I would have been surprised if they hadn't.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:12:51] Actually, I liked the sense that it partnered up with third party manufacturers like LG and Lenovo. So they didn't bring their own device, but they used reliable manufacturers and bidding and putting their systems into their devices. I think that's a good move, not having their own device but enabling other manufactures putting newer technology in their stuff.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:13:16] They could have gone the other way around just producing their own device, but I think like Tim said maybe their design is not that advanced so it's much better to give it to other people.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:13:26] This is going to be an interesting showdown to watch. I want to follow up asking about the Echo Show competitors that Google rolled out with another question. What do y'all talk to your clients about and sort of how you advise individuals and businesses with how to approach voice? I'm curious just for myself. If you've got a company that has a limited amount of money to spend on creating a voice presence are you going to tell them at this point, as we head into 2018, that they need to not spend any money until they can have a presence both voice only like in the original Echo or if it's just voice, just audio, and a multi-modal presence like with the Echo Show and with some of these Google devices? Or would you tell them to go one way or the other, to focus more on the voice first application with visuals or don't worry about that for now? Share with me just your thoughts on how you might advise a client that has a limited budget, which way would you have them go first? I am curious.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:14:31] Yeah actually I think if you have really a limited budget I would go voice-first in general because many devices out there only support voice and have no screen at all at the moment. It depends a little bit on your product. If you have a media product that already has a strong presence in the visual field, then you might consider doing visual and voice services for your devices.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:14:52] So it just depends on what your existing assets are and it's very specific.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:14:56] On the other hand, I think if you look at the market at the moment you have, I don't know what the ratio is. My feeling is that its 90 percent voice only and 10 percent with the addition of screens attached. So spend your money on voice and get the most bang for the buck. I think as we are talking here, the picture is turning and you see TVs coming out with Alexa and new Echo Show devices and Google Home. So let me answer this question again in 6 months and I might say it different.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:15:25] Well sure and that's exactly why I asked because if you are a consumer brand, like a lot of companies that we work with are publishing content of different types, whether it's books or series of books or different content, and you're absolutely right of what you said about six months from now. If you start creating a voice application, let's say we've got a publisher they want to create an Alexa skill and there's a discussion about whether they want to integrate visuals into it. I completely agree with you that is probably like 90/10 right now, maybe 80/20 at max, six months from now given the velocity of the market it could be totally different. I think that's a challenging discussion given how fast things are moving. Tim, what do you think?

 

Tim Kahle: [00:16:08] Yeah, I think we have to keep in mind that Alexa has been introduced only one year ago in Germany regarding our clients here, our marketing in Germany. So the Echo Show devices have been shipped in December, so only one month ago. So at the moment I think in Germany it would take a while. We first have to get familiar about the new technology and about the voice first technology and have to learn, not to learn, but to get familiar about this whole new world. There are tons of possibilities Alexa or other voice assistants have so at the moment we are playing around. We developers are playing around with Echo Show and the outputs what they display, but we are still waiting for the very good and excellent apps besides our projects for voice-first. So I think not only in 6 months, or next week or in two weeks we will answer maybe different to this question.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:17:08] Sure and it's easy to forget that we are sort of on the vanguard of all this and there's a lot of catching up that it's being done right now with Amazon and Google leading the way.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:17:17] This leads me into the next story from CES and Dominik you mentioned smart TVs. You know one of the major news stories coming out of CES is these four case smart TVs with Alexa integration and I want to share something that happened to me over Christmas. I was visiting with my family and my parents and my extended family, and we had the TV on and we were watching one sporting event and we wanted to switch to another one and we couldn't find the remote, and there's no telling where it was. There were a lot kids running around it could have been anywhere. I didn't know this, but my brother who is a software developer had set up my parents’ TV to be Alexa enabled through a logic tech device I think. So rather than have to search everywhere for the remote, all we had to do is say "Alexa change channel to channel 58, or whatever it was. That was just an eye-opening moment for me; I didn't know they had that capability where I was. Just the convenience of that, it just opened my eyes to the realization that the moment that this technology is available with TV, to speak to it and make it do stuff, we're never going to leave that world. I want to get both your thoughts, and Tim I'll start with you. Do you share my optimism for integrating voice into smart TVs, what's your opinion on that?

 

Tim Kahle: [00:18:41] I mean TVs with voice control are not that new, not even in Germany. So I'm able to control my 5 year old Samsung TV by voice by speaking into the remote. I never used it, not a single time that I can remember. So the big question is, and I would give that back to you or to Dominik as well, will that change when Alexa is living in the TV? I think it will be very interesting.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:19:11] That's a good point, I think you're right. Voice capabilities for devices such as TVs have existed and the moment you said that I started thinking, I've got Comcast TV here at our house and Comcast actually recently shipped us a voice enabled remote where you can speak into the remote and when they did that I didn't rush to get it out of the box. I didn't rush to set it up thinking wow everything is changed now, and similarly I haven't sought out the capability of making up TVs in our house voice enabled. Even after coming back from Christmas in weeks and having that experience I described earlier.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:19:56] So I think that touches on the point that what Amazon has done, and Google to a lesser extent, Amazon and Google together leading the marketplace has sort of taken us there. Maybe it was ahead of its time before and now the expectations have changed. People are ready for it. It's just a different sort of mindset. Dominik, what do you think you think? Do smart TVs excite you when they've got Alexa? Do you think it's more likely that Alexa and Google integration will lead to greater adoption? What's your take on seeing this story?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:20:27] I think in the beginning I think iPhone, removing the remote control by voice why not do it, no one needs the remote anymore. I mean on the other hand I don't know if you could have done this five years ago, as we have talked earlier so you haven't done it. What excites me most is that I think that you get technology into the TV that everybody knows at the moment or is talking about. So you could ask and people know how to use the Alexa devices nowadays in their TV. So I think that can raise their awareness and then the customer experience stuff beyond what was already done in the future at the moment, and this will push its users to use them more than they did in past.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:21:11] Yeah and you know there might have been a stigma before. If you talk to your TV like with a Samsung TV and if there was some ability to talk with that, that might have been weird, that might have been something you wouldn't have done until here along comes Amazon advertising on TV all the time, at least here in the United States, people talking to devices and talking to Echo devices and establishing that expectation in then Google follow your logic behind them. Yeah, that's an interesting perspective on that.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:45:02] Let me go to the next story here with Alexa getting integrated into Windows 10 computers. In the last episode of the first season of This Week In Voice we commented on all the different companies and gave them a letter grade, and there was some consensus from that panel that the Cortana Alexa partnership needed a lot more flushing out, and here we see something that I think is only bound to cause even more confusion. Alexa is now on Windows 10 computers and the first thought that comes to my mind is, if Amazon is successful in getting Alexa on Windows 10 computers which don't belong to them, that's another big tech company's products, where will they not be successful? If they can cross that bridge what is it they can't do? How do y'all see this? Do you see this as just confusing like I do, or do you see almost an expectation at this point? What are your thoughts Dominik?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:46:05] Yeah, I mean they made the partnership I think six months or twelve month ago and everybody is wondering what the partnership will be. I mean Cortana couldn't get their foot in the door. So that's I think that's why they partnered up with Amazon which was a good move for them just to get the traction. I think now is the consequence, to put everything in the Windows 10, and I think that's the consequence of their partnership. If you really want to do it, then you have to do like this way. In the end what comes out is a big question mark for sure, but the customer reach on devices will be huge. How many Window 10 devices are out there in the market?

 

Tim Kahle: [00:46:45] From my perspective it's not more confusing than building, implementing Alexa into earbuds, in your earphones. I just mentioned that I love the hardware buttons on my Echo Dot and I missed that at the Echo Show. I'm super happy that Avis not only announced to build an Alexa to their device but also applies keyboard shortcuts for triggering it. So to sum up, I think Microsoft did the right move to cooperate with Amazon and to integrate Alexa into their operating system. I think with Alexa on board, especially you guys from the U.S., you have three years of experience, two and a half with Alexa, you know how to behave and how to use Alexa skills. Other features may be off of your PCs; it might open some programs or schedule a meeting in Outlook via voice. I think here in Germany this would also take a while if we had to adapt to all these new capabilities of having Alexa on every single device in my daily life. So for Microsoft it's very good and I'm curious about the opportunities and how it will be adopted by other people around the world.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:48:17] It is interesting, Microsoft got their own voice assistant and yet that's not what they're trumpeting in their own new computers or with their operating system. Just the realization from all these manufacturers producing PCs that have Windows 10 on them that putting Alexa on their hardware is going to be a competitive advantage to Apple with Siri on their hardware. It's interesting to trace that through, but I think it does confuse me from the standpoint of you would expect some clarity coming from Microsoft on what exactly they hope to accomplish with Cortana in 2018. But I do agree, as far as these particular products are concerned it's going to help to sell.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:48:57] Let me go to my last story here, and it's the Voicebot.AI story of the week. So Voicebot.AI is a very interesting, very well put together news website for voice. We have had a partnership with them in 2017 where we have a Voicebot.AI story of the week and we're going to continue that here in Season 2 of This Week In Voice. The story this week is actually twofold. This is just very interesting. This is a highly unusual situation I feel like where there was a briefing at CES where Panasonic has this in-car offering, this in-car system. At first they announced that it's got Alexa built into it, and then later in the same briefing they announced that Google Assistant's also built into it and Someone from Google came on to talk about it and you just had to laugh. I mean I don't know what else you can do. It's an eye-opening thing.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:49:48] I think it's something that we may see more of and really this gets to the heart of my question, I want to pose this for both of y'all. So as we move forward, we've got Amazon with Alexa, we've got Google with Google Assistant, at some point you have to think Apple will get more serious. You got Samsung with Bixby; you got all these different voice assistants that are being developed by maybe smaller companies that are going to compete in different ways. Is this par, is this a glimpse into the future that's voice assistants will live together on the same hardware? Or is this just sort of a one-off thing that somehow happened, that it's going to make both of these companies mad after CES is over and lead to companies having contractual negotiated outcomes where you either go with Alexa by God or it's not going to be exclusively, or Alexa it's not going to be on your device at all. So which way do you see this going? Do you see this story that happened at CES being a glimpse into an open future or a glimpse into a closed future and whoever wants to start can.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:51:01] I think in-car entertainment or the improvement of primarily middle interfaces seems to be huge a thing at CES and every other fair for a couple of years now, and in my opinion it's an interesting move that Amazon is able to skip this step and some manufacturers even here in Germany announced already that they will integrate Alexa into their new Sirius. I think its Fiat and Skoda, in fact Volkswagen VW and other firms. So I think it becomes even more interesting when it's possible, right now it's possible to create a seamless voice experience between devices or environments such as home, my office with Alexa for Business, or doing my workout session with other devices around me, and now also in my car. Now it's time to take very good scenarios where we need this seamless experience. Maybe no one knows these scenarios yet, but for sure they will come up. So a great move and I think this opens a lot more possibilities and scenarios that users can now use their voice to use Alexa to control their in-car entertainment system.

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:52:31] It's interesting what you said about the contractual obligations if you put both assistants in one device. I would put myself in the shoes of other manufacturers. I would love to have every assistant in my device because that gets the most footprints out of my product. But as you said maybe at some point it's kind of a race, and you don't want to have both of them in there, one competitor doesn't want the other. So they don't like each other and they're usually are not happy with having both of them.

 

Tim Kahle: [00:52:58] We will see more of this in future that there will be contractual obligations, that there's only one assistant is in the device.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:53:09] Yeah, I agree with that and in this specific episode that just happened at CES. Think about it from Amazon's point of view, they've got Panasonic announcing this thing and they announce it's got Alexa and then they go on and announce that it's got Google Assistant. So in other words, it was the company's perspective that having Amazon Alexa integrated into this product was not satisfactory for it to sell by itself, you know what I mean? There's sort of that implicit statement being made like if we have multiple voice assistants in this product then that signals to the market that we felt like we had to, you know what I mean? We felt like we had to because what the voice assistants do on their own was not enough and so we just wanted to combine as many as we can, and that's certainly not going to appeal. That's not a message that I think Amazon or Google wants to have out there, and so that obviously that's just one possible interpretation of what happened, but I think it's a reasonable one. This is just a very interesting thing that has happened that was worth discussing. Are there any closing thoughts on that?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:54:20] I think it's just as you said, it just shows that there's a race out there and that all the competitors are racing at the moment and trying to squeeze every inch out onto the other competitor.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:54:31] Sure, and I completely agree. So that closes our discussion on CES. I'm sure there will be more news coming out the rest of the week but I think that provides a pretty good glimpse at that.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:54:41] Let's shift gears for a moment to talk about what's coming up next week, which is the Alexa Conference. We are super excited about it. The Alexa Conference is the annual gathering of Alexa developers and enthusiasts from around the world. The event has doubled in size. We piloted it last year. We didn't really promote it. We just wanted to sort of experiment with it and we were shocked at the number of people who attended and from all the different places they came from, including overseas. So it was at that point that we decided to make this a permanent conference, and the more we learned with my company about voice technology the more enamored that we got.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:55:20] So that has led to this year's Alexa Conference which takes place in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As I've said many times before, this is an incredibly underrated city in the United States. Everyone who is at the conference will get a chance to see that. The main differentiator between something like the Alexa Conference and something like CES or Amazon's own conference, re:Invent that took place a few months ago, is that we feel like it is extremely important to have a conference that allows discussion of Amazon's ecosystem and Alexa in an unbiased, uncensored environment so Alexa can be discussed in context with the competitors. The pros can be discussed, as well as the kinds this is not an Amazon marketing hour sort of thing. This is just real ground truth that we're trying to get to. We are very honored, as I said before, to have Tim and Dominik join us. They'll be providing a briefing on adoption for Alexa across Germany and in Europe which is phenomenal.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:56:20] We've got some other things that are listed on the This Week In Voice site that are some highlights. The first Alexa for Business Lab to be run at any conference in the world will be taking place, run by an individual named Liz Meyers who is a former Amazon Alexa technical evangelist up until just very recently and that's going to be phenomenal. The government is involved with this conference. The FTC is sending one of their head attorneys involved in IOT and privacy concerns to talk about privacy and Alexa and to share the government's perspective on that. There's also a privacy panel that's taking place as part of the event. The keynote is Dr. Ahmed Bouzid, who was the former Head of Product for Alexa at Amazon Connective Homes Initiative, who now runs a software-as-a-service company out of the D.C. area called Witlingo. He's going to be phenomenal. Gentlemen, Tim and Dominik, I want to just ask you what excites you the most about the program for the Alexa Conference? What are you most looking forward to?

 

Dominik Meissner: [00:57:21] What excites me most is getting in touch with the community, meeting all the people we have only met via Twitter and social media, email, voice as telephone calls and that sort of stuff. So we'd like to see them face to face to have a chat, to see what they are doing. That's what I'm looking for next week for sure.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:57:42] Awesome, yeah it will be fun to bring everybody together won't it, a lot of names that people are used to only seeing in social media that will become real people in a matter of a week or so. Tim, what are your thoughts?

 

Tim Kahle: [00:57:54] I also look forward to meeting the voice experts from the U.S. and from all over the world, including representatives from different companies that you only know from social media such as VoiceXP, Bespoken and many more and the Mayor from Chattanooga will be there. So it's going to be a blast and we're really happy to be part of it. I think the Alexa for Business Lab will be a great playground to figure out via business scenarios and to discuss shared devices. Liz Myers, as the leader of the Alexa for Business Lab, is definitely great choice. We met her during an Alexa Hackathon in Munich. She's a great person and has a very broad knowledge about Alexa and the technology behind it so I think she's a great choice. Of course we're happy that the Alexa Conference got attention from the U.S. government so it's awesome, and that we have a short presentation on Friday morning about the rise of Alexa in Germany. It's going to be three very great days.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:59:02] Oh yeah, I completely agree and it's going to be fun too. We've got a couple of attendees from all sorts of companies, small and large, attending. Intel and Asurion, and Nissan is sending somebody, I just found that out yesterday, and there's several others, I won't mention them all. Then peopled are coming from all sorts of different countries, y'all are coming from Germany, Bespoken is coming from Peru, Octavia Medical, a great agency coming from Nicaragua. People coming from all over the place and we're honored by that and it's going to be a lot of fun.

 

Bradley Metrock: [00:59:36] The one thing I will say we just announced this morning, we just made a change to the website, that the venue of the conference we are moving it to a location that's more central to downtown. It's going to be at the Chattanooga Public Library which has a phenomenal venue. The previous venue we were having some questions on whether they would be able to deliver everything. So we just posted that this morning. We're going to send an e-mail out to everyone attending and to the LISTSERV so everyone is aware of that. It will be much more convenient for people to get to, especially those who are staying from out of town, because it will be much closer to several of the hotels and stuff and it will be a much less Uber driving distance or whatever.

 

Bradley Metrock: [01:00:12] The other thing about it is there is a VoiceFirst.FM reception that we're having Thursday night and we moved that to this really phenomenal venue called Songbirds Guitar Museum. Chattanooga has a brand new guitar museum, it's got one of the largest portfolios of high end and rare guitars in the world, and that is where we're going to have the VoiceFirst.FM reception. That's going to be a treat that we didn't expect to be able to offer, but we will. So yeah there's going to be a lot of fun, there's going to be incredible speakers. It will set the groundwork for the conference doubling again in size when we do it next year. So we wanted to make sure that we shared some information on this podcast about the Alexa Conference in detail and that's what we've done. Any closing thoughts on the Alexa Conference for next week guys?

 

Dominik Meissner: [01:01:01] It's going to be like an assembly gathering except your annoying family won't be there.

 

Tim Kahle: [01:01:06] Yeah we will definitely have a podcast and our show, The All About Voice podcast afterwards to report and to share experiences from the Conference.

 

Bradley Metrock: [01:01:16] Gentlemen, thank you very much for setting your time aside today and sharing that time and your insights with not just me, but the audience. It's greatly appreciated.

 

Tim Kahle: [01:01:26] Thanks so much for having us on the show. It was great.

 

Dominik Meissner: [01:01:28] Yes, thank you Bradley.

 

Bradley Metrock: [01:01:28] For This Week In Voice, Episode 1 of Season 2, thank you for listening and until next time.