What is Voice First?
This past September I became the Director of Voice First.
We are a business that creates voice apps on Google Assistant & Amazon Alexa. We help businesses who have products or services reach customers through smart speakers. This also means we play a role in helping people incorporate the internet of things in their life and business practices.
Why?
Because we are saving people time and making them money.
Let’s say you are a dry cleaning business. We created a dry cleaning app that allows customers to order their clothes to be picked up, cleaned & returned. Customers who download the voice app will never have to drive their laundry to an in-store location again. And business owners can focus more on operations rather than the logistics of executing their business. We created the app “My Dry Cleaner” with the intention of saving people time and allowing business owners to provide more value to their customers. This same concept has the potential to apply to every industry.
Take the restaurant industry, for example. Imagine being able to order, drinks, appetizers, entres & desert all from your table whenever you want. When an order is placed, the kitchen staff is notified and can get people their orders faster and with more accuracy. Voice technology enables waiters and waitresses to spend more time delighting customers rather than running back and forth to record people’s orders. Managers love the process because the voice devices repeat orders to customers before sending them in. This means there will be many fewer instances of mistakes made through ordering. When it is time for you to leave, you can get your check without having to flag down anyone. You can just ask for anything you want and the staff will be notified.
The application that voice will offer depends on the industry. Not every app is the same, but the same basic principles hold true. Customers engage with smart speakers allowing them to save time and ultimately accomplish more with their days. Imagine if you could check in, check out, order room services, ask for towels & shampoo or schedule an alarm all from the comfort of your hotel room. With our hotel voice app, we are augmenting customer’s hotel experience so that business owners can maximize the service they offer. This concept applies to so many industries and will allow people to accomplish more than ever before.
People are addicted to screens. We want to make people more interactive with less friction in the things they do. Communication can become much more natural. Just in the past few years have people spent an exorbitant amount of time on screens. Voice First wants to enable people to free their hands and eyes so they can focus on the projects that are in the physical world. Any digital interaction can be shifted from the world of screens to a conversation with a smart speaker. We want to make people’s interactions with technology more natural so they can accomplish more with their time.
Voice First is founded by Patrick Sweetman. He has worked for companies like Uptake, GE & Amazon as a programmer and was one of the original tech innovators to start coding voice apps. He has experience in industries across the board and is hoping that he can empower the world to learn more and be more efficient with their time. He is a strong believer in the concept of 1+1=3. This theory suggests that when people work together rather than in competition they can accomplish more than what would have been possible separately. This core belief of Voice First is why we are an Open Source Organization. We publish everything we learn to the internet so the world can access and utilize the lessons we are learning over time. Many old-fashioned businesses keep secrets about the way they do business, this causes the halt of innovation. Voice First hopes to see the expansion of the voice industry by contributing to the general knowledge pool of humanity pertaining to creating voice apps and saving people & programmers time.
1 in 5 Americans now owns a smart speaker while 50% of Americans have access to one. As more people see the benefits that smart speakers can bring to their lives, we hope to continue to create apps that bring them value. Given Amazon released the Echo Dot in 2014, this makes it the fastest growing platform on earth. Our mission is to augment customers reality by creating systems that genuinely bring them value. In the years to come, we hope to enter new industries and bring innovation to the forefront of people’s daily lives.
Do you have an idea about voice apps we should be building? Feel free to reach out to patrick@voicefirsttech.com with ideas or questions.
Thank you for your time.