CES 2020? 3 Takeaways with Big Implications to Voice’s Future
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Happy New Year! It’s the roaring 2020’s and what a way to begin the year at CES in Las Vegas. It was my first time at CES and it was fantastic to be there on behalf of Women in Voice as the Founder and Director and VERSA as Head of Conversational Research and Strategy.
People around the world have been asking about how it went and after some reflection, here are my 3 big takeaways.
VOICE at CES 2020 Panel: Left to right: E.B. Moss, MediaVillage, Bret Kinsella, Voicebot.ai, me, Tom Webster, Edison Research
1. Google is Ready to Make Friends, Here’s their Contact Info
A major takeaway from CES was Google’s demonstrated readiness to form partnerships. In the voice community, many have noted Google’s demonstrated absence or last-minute joining of conferences domestic and international 2018–2019. At CES we got some backstory behind those decisions, Danny Bernstein, Managing Director of Global Product Partnerships at Google, discussed how his team went on a listening tour last year.
Google’s strategy seems to be savvy partnering with big players on projects like Nike’s shoe drop, BeNext’s carnival project in Brazil, and a Frozen 2’s interactive product in Japan. They also have seemed to realize that they can’t do all this work to amplify voice worldwide alone.
Ultimately, “we’re going to be at a lot more conferences,” said Bernstein. Here are the details posted on a slide from CES. They want to be in touch and I for one will be following up with VERSA projects to collaborate on shortly.
Partnerships: Email voice-community@google.com
Tech: Search “Google Assistant Dev Support”
Fund: Search “Google Assistant Fund”
Slide from CES 2020, Danny Bernstein
2. Collaboration is Queen: See Voicebot.ai & Women in Voice
Collaboration is a major theme seen at CES and beyond. Google’s message of wanting to connect and collaborate was an explicit message. Voicebot.ai and Women in Voice have similar messages. Why not the title “Collaboration is King?” because disruption to archaic norms and female leadership are integral to voice tech’s future.
If you follow Voicebot.ai, then you know that “Collaboration” was voted the BIGGEST news story of the year by respondents of the Voicebot.ai survey where we saw that Amazon, Apple, and Google are collaborating with Samsung, IKEA, and other Zigbee Alliance on topics of voice compatibility and security. People were surprised by this and it has incredible significance to the evolution of our field. This is collaboration on an international scale.
Top 2019 Voice AI Story: “Apple, Amazon, Google to collaborate on smart home standards”
Collaborating & Shaping the Future? Enter Women in Voice
Lilian Rincon, Senior Director of Product Management at Google, speaking at Women in Tech Happy Hour at CES in partnership with Women in Voice
Left to Right: Jossie Haines, Engineering Leader at Tile (former Siri Domains Engineering Manager at Apple), me, & Sharon Yan, graduate student at MIT
If you know anything about Women in Voice, you know that sustainably improving the voice tech world together is a part of our mission. At CES, we had an amazing event where we graciously partnered with the Google Assistant team.
Mastermind Leslie Garcia-Amaya, Global Product Partnerships (GPP), AI at Google, orchestrated an amazing event of networking and celebrating the women driving innovation across our industry, which we co-hosted with the Google Assistant team.
Googlers Left to Right: Meggie Hollinger, Senior PM for Assistant Feature Development, Leslie Garcia-Amaya, Global Product Partnerships (GPP), Danielle Michel, Administrative Business Partner
This was the 3rd annual “Women In Tech Happy Hour” hosted by Google Assistant GPP and Product teams where roughly 140 women leaders and allies to network and celebrate the women driving innovation across our industry.
Energy in the room was buoyant, loquacious, and enlivening. At Women in Voice, we know the power of community and it’s felt at events like these. We regularly host hackathons, meetups, and happy hours all over the world. Women in Voice now has 9 chapters: Seattle, Japan, NYC, Madrid, Mexico City, France, Netherlands, Germany, and London. We also have several launching in 2020! Almost like voice tech is a global phenomenon, right?
At the event, I spoke with people around the world from companies, agencies, startups, research institutes, and others: Sephora, Apple, Facebook, MLB, Voicebot.ai, Buzzfeed, MIT, NPR, NBA, WeWork Labs, and Jargon. Some familiar faces and some new ones!
3. Obvious but Noteworthy: The Voice Community is Tight & Expanding
“We seek to build a community for voice professionals to connect with one another,” says Pete Erickson, Founder of VOICE Summit. It is noteworthy that the more voice conferences and events you attend, the more you start seeing the same faces around. From the entryways, to the round tables, to the speakers’ lounge, to the stage, there’s a sense of camaraderie rather than aggressive competition thus far.
Some are agencies. Some are brands. Some are healthcare moguls. Some are pivoting to tooling. We all have a common thread to our work and realize that working together can magnify our work from Las Vegas, to Seattle, to Australia, and beyond.
What an exciting time for voice’s future! I’ve got a new article coming out all about SEO, voice as a platform, and multimodal interfaces, but for now I’ll follow Google’s lead and leave you VERSA’s contact information:
VERSA USA Team: Email hello@versa.agency
Tech: https://versa.agency/
Examples of VERSA Work: https://versa.agency/case-studies
