Voice Box Office — Micah Hollingworth, Broadw.ai — Voice Tech Podcast ep.043
Full Episode
Episode description
Micah Hollingworth is CEO and co-founder of Broadw.ai, an AI powered ticketing agent and integrated marketing platform for live Broadway events and theatre-goers. We discover how voice and conversational AI are being used in the theatre industry, helping to tackle the most pressing challenges faced by consumers and ticket sellers.
Conversational interfaces capture huge amounts of data, which is key to targeting the right customers in outbound campaigns, personalising the offer, and selling tickets quickly. Hear Micah’s vision for the future of voice tech in entertainment, including conversational ticket sales, integration with our content feeds, and even appearing in mainstream media.
This conversation demonstrates the huge impact conversational technology is having on every industry, even those typically seen as slow to adopt new technologies. Prepare to change the way you see the theatre!
Quotes from the show
[09:22] “I can extend where I can sell my seats, influence which seats are sold, and gather a tremendous amount of data”
[23:43] “Everybody can agree that’s a good use of voice. It’s a canny way of winning the hearts and minds of people”
[34:01] “For desktop visits, you can serve up content. For mobile visits, jump straight to the order form”
[01:01:28] “To combat AI bias, ensure the people designing it have a variety of backgrounds”
Highlights from the show
What is Broadwai?
- An AI powered ticketing agent and an integrated marketing platform
Could you tell us about the Broadw.ai product?
- It’s both a mobile app with a text-based conversational interface, and a voice app on Amazon Alexa that uses Amazon Pay. It allows customers to find out about shows, receive event updates, and buy tickets.
What’s your business model?
- It’s primarily around providing data to ticket sellers, and allowing them to have an on-brand conversation to build a relationship with their customers. Selling tickets is not the primary focus.
How would you describe the theatre industry?
- The model is very similar to a startup, with high stakes, a low success rate and a big payoff for the winners.
What problems do consumers typically face when booking tickets?
- The process is clunky with many steps, making it easy to abandon at various stages. Therefore the most important factor is speed of sale, to avoid abandonment.
What problems do ticket sellers typically face?
- Primary sellers e.g. ticketmaster, needs to make the sale where customers already are, so being on Facebook is a huge plus. Secondary seller (resellers) face the same problem.
How can voice can help solve these problems?
- Conversational interfaces capture huge amounts of data which the seller can use to optimise their sales funner. They can identify where customers are abandoning funnel, improve pricing, and more.
What strategies are the major players using to increase adoption of voice?
- They focus on the niche use cases such as the elderly, children and the disabled, whic helps gather agreement amongst the masses that voice is a useful too. This then influences how people see the technology more generally.
How do you see ticket selling integrated with voice apps in the future?
- Audio content can be enhanced with ticket sales. For example, while listening to music by a particular artist, the platform could offer you information and tickets to for their event in your area.
What does your marketing platform do?
- It’s an outbound marketing channel that proactively suggests events to people on Facebook Messenger. It uses Google Tags, a type of conversational cookie, to save the content of previous conversations and provide more personalised results.
What information is used to personalise the outbound messages?
- They use information such as device type, and whether they are in their home city or not (i.e. a tourist or not).
How do you personalise the outbound messages?
- They can personalise the tickets offered, and also customise the payment options e.g. apple pay or android pay. If users are on a desktop they might provide more content, wheras if on a mobile, they might jump straight to payment.
How should we use Facebook Messenger as a marketing channel?
- FB messenger is not an inbound channel, as users prefer to post on the page or engage with posts. It is a powerful outbound channel to continue the conversation post-purchase, to build excitement about upcoming show, and upsell extras. This also continues after they’ve attended the show, to get them to share with friends, and invite using referral codes.
What technical challenges did you face?
- Most of the core tech is provided by Satisfy labs, so Broadw.ai project managed all the integration with external APIs such as ticket payments. Payments challenges are often around security and PCI compliance.
How fast is the entertainment industry adopting voice?
- It was slow but is now accelerating, driven by consumer behaviour outside of the industry and generational change
Where we can expect to see voice appear soon?
- It will hit mainstream entertainment in the next year or so, but will arrive in the workplace much sooner
Does voice poses a threat to the industry at all?
- The major concern is privacy, and it’s still unclear how it will play out as the conversation about personal privacy still ongoing. Algorithic bias is another concern — one solution is to vary the background of people making decisions on the AI
Links from the show
- Manning books: https://www.manning.com << 40% off all books code: PODVOICETECH19
- VoiceTech Paris 2019 tickets: http://bit.ly/35Mo3tv << 20% off code: VT19-VTECHPOD
- SquadCast: http://squadcast.fm << 50% off code: VOICETECHPOD off Unlimited plan, $10 off Dabbler plan
- Take the voice-based survey: “Alexa/Google, launch Voice Tech Survey”
- Broadw.ai: https://www.broadw.ai/
- Micah on LinkedIn: http://bit.ly/2J9EB53
- Satisfy Labs: https://satisfilabs.com
- Navigate the web using voice: http://bit.ly/33MmhGQ
- Zuora subscription payments: https://www.zuora.com
Subscribe to get future episodes
- Apple iTunes: https://apple.co/2LqW4ol
- Google Podcasts: http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-google
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2IZr5hm
Join the discussion
- Weekly Newsletter: https://voicetechpodcast.com/newsletter
- Medium Blog: https://voicetechpodcast.com/medium
- Write for Blog: https://voicetechpodcast.com/publish
- Email: carl@voicetechpodcast.com
- Twitter: http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-twitter
- Reddit: http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-reddit
- Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-facebook-group
- Facebook Page: http://bit.ly/voicetechpodcast-facebook-page
Support the Voice Tech Podcast
- Become a patron: https://voicetechpodcast.com/donate
- Tell a friend about us or share on social media!
- Leave a 5-star review on iTunes: https://apple.co/2LqW4ol
