Longwave: The Summer Press Roundup
Maybe it’s just a Boston thing, but it seems like the long summer days are reaching their end. I hope you’ve been enjoying our weekly news updates on the Shortwave, and that you’ve been remembering to vote in the Committee each weekend (I won’t hold it against you that the sno-cone machine stayed in California)!
While we haven’t written to you in a hot sec, we have a lot of great stuff to share from our busy post-camp summer days. CEO Jon Myers and CCO Dave Grossman have each been speakers on recent podcasts and panels, and Earplay has demoed and featured in multiple publications and conventions since our last round-up! So, it’s about time for another breakdown. Here are some of the coolest ways Earplay has shown up online during the hot months of summer!
Hot Takes to Take Home
Most recently, the Earplay demo made an appearance at the 42-minute mark of the Tech News Today Episode 1845, hosted by Megan Morrone. She and Mikah Sargent start from her bookmark in the middle of the action, and then rewind to the beginning to demonstrate how the game works — and as you can see, they’re having a really good time doing it!
They have kind words to share about “the drama that’s involved” in Earplay and the high-quality audio production that sets us apart from other Amazon Alexa skills. You can watch the rest of the video demo on YouTube by clicking through the preview!
Another exciting feature came from the top-tier tech publishers over at Engadget, in the prophetically-titled article, “The next video-game controller is your voice.” Chris Ip’s introduction to Earplay hails us as “a leading publisher of audio games,” and details CCO Dave and CEO Jon’s storytelling roots. He does an excellent job of surveying the inspirations behind us modern descendants of old-time radio drama.
“…in Codename Cygnus, you play a James Bond-esque spy navigating foreign locales and villains with contrived European accents, receiving instructions via an earpiece. Meanwhile, in Half, you navigate a surreal Groundhog Day scenario, picking up clues on each playthrough to escape the infinitely repeating sequence of events.”
Got Friends in Voice Places
The fantastic series of VoiceFirst.FM podcasts by Bradley Metrock have already attracted thousands of listeners in just their first three months of production. We were honored to be included in two different broadcasts. First, Jonathon Myers was invited to speak on This Week in Voice Episode 6, where he and two other speech-enabled tech experts go in-depth on their industry’s takes on the voice-first issues of the day. Listen in for a little perspective on inter-enterprise drama, accessibility tech, data security, and “the end of typing” as we know it.
Shortly thereafter, both Jon Myers and Dave Grossman were invited back for an interview in the VoiceFirst Roundtable Episode 7! With Bradley, they cover topics ranging from voice app monetization, what makes good game audio, and which older video games inspired the next wave of audio-themed and narrative-driven games. You can follow both the This Week in Voice and VoiceFirst Roundtable podcasts from Apple podcasts, or your preferred podcatcher!
In more industry-related news, Alon Bonder’s post on Startup Grind discusses the potential value of the voice marketplace, which has been growing exponentially in the last few years. Bonder — and the folks at Earplay — are particularly excited about the native advantages of voice-first technology in designing applications like ours, such as the ease and speed of speech interpretation, and the hands-free/screen-free convenience so necessary to our messy modern lives. We’re sitting cozy right next to Uber under the consumer category!
Just one week later, Jerry Lu published “The Voice Enabled Revolution” on Startup Grind, with his own map of the current voice technology landscape. He breaks voice application into industry categories — we’re hanging out next to new podcasting communities Bumpers and CastBox down in Media-and-Content-land.
Finally, our CEO Jon Myers was just recently included in Smartly.AI’s list of “People to Follow in the Voice Ecosystem,” along with a number of our fellow alumni from the Betaworks Voicecamp and professionals from Amazon, Google, Pinterest, and all the great new up-and-comers here in the threshold of all-new voice technologies. As Smartly notes — don’t be shy! The list is chock-full of folks that are friendly and accessible on Twitter or LinkedIn, ready to answer your questions about the future of voice.
“From company CEOs to voice experts, enthusiasts and developers, we have compiled a list of voice influencers that you need to watch in order to keep up to date with the most groundbreaking and interesting voice first content.”
Convention Shenanigans
Our CCO Dave Grossman made his way out to Seattle for PAX Prime, to speak on a panel called “Voice: The New Gaming Frontier” alongside our brilliant friend and collaborator Bonnie Bogovich, as well as Amazon game director Ian Vogel, Alexa dev-master Paul Cutsinger, and The Magic Door creator Andrew Huntwork.
Not only that, Eddy Webb’s table at Gen-Con sold out of Pugmire books within the first couple of days — and that’s in addition to the ones that went out in the mail over the weeks before! After two incredibly successful Kickstarter campaigns, there’s a TON of excitement drumming up around Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau — and we can’t wait to introduce our Pugmire story to all of the amazing and imaginative tabletop gaming fans out there!
Check out some of the highlights from the Gen-Con Twitterverse:
https://twitter.com/BeefyGhost/status/898211986957373442
That’s all, folks
Whew! Betty Byline may be able to manage a Shortwave, but this has surely been more of a Longwave. If you’re still with us, thank you for listening to Earplay, and for helping to forge the future of interactive audio stories! Remember to check out those 7 free episodes of Codename Cygnus Mission 1. I hope to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter, and keep up those Committee votes — something good HAS to happen to us eventually, right?
