Voice This! Podcast: Episode 1
Introduction to Conversational AI with Tim Bettridge
Join host Millani and guest Tim Bettridge as they trace Tim’s journey into voice technology, discuss how Voice User Interfaces can help reclaim our time and keep us engaged with the world around us, and explore the present and future of voice technology.
Tim’s Bio
Tim, co-founder of Voice Tech Global, created VTG with the hope that passionate voice practitioners could have a platform to convene, learn, and build together. Tim also directs Civic Lab, where cross-functional specialists create voice products for social good. Tim is a techie who’s always been intrigued with sci-fi, and has been a designer for web and mobile until venturing into voice in the past few years.
Since this podcast was released, Voice Tech Global is no longer operational and Tim has changed jobs and is now at Google!
Quotes from the episode
With artificial intelligence, you’re basically talking about intelligence that is not natural intelligence that we see in humans and animals a lot of people conflate. AI with machine learning and that’s not always true as well. you know, artificial intelligence can be, rigid as well or predetermined. So conversational AI to me is kind of an umbrella term, which is useful, when talking about it at a high level. In practice, I’ll tend to use more specific terms like a conversational user interface or a conversational interface, to really disambiguate that from other types of interfaces that exist under this umbrella.
I think it’s over 50% of us households and over I think 30% of Canadian households have smart speakers now. So brands will want to be able to use those as touch points and connect with your customers through this new channel.
And so just like people will kind of position their wifi routers so that they have Internet throughout their home, or they might get several different routers throughout creating a mesh network. I kind of think about [smart speakers] in the sense, in my own spacem, I want to have a mesh network[of speakers]. I want to have enough of them, together, so that I can use it everywhere in my home in a seamless way.
In the beginning, we were figuring things out as we went and that involved, establishing our own, ways to do iterative, rapid prototyping and testing, including the development of tools that we worked with, design tools, to actually, test and validate some of the things that we, we really wanted to try out before jumping into development.
So when we say conversational AI, that includes voice interfaces. It also includes chatbots and chatbots have been very helpful recently in customer service, There’s also a huge opportunity and across many different industries, including, education, finance or real estate and definitely in the automotive space where we’ve seen conversational interfaces, voice input or voice assistants in cars for many years.
There are some excellent resources available from Amazon and Google to just get started. They both have really good design guidelines and development documentation.[…] but I also, I think it’s really good to learn with others. So I’m a big proponent of working and working groups like Civic Lab. There’s also organizations like Civic Tech Toronto and Civic Tech Canada. So you can certainly find like minded people. There’s, also a lot of resources on the Voice Tech Global website.
Reference Links
Wired for Speech
https://www.amazon.ca/Wired-Speech-Activates-Human-Computer-Relationship/dp/0262640651/
About Voice This! Podcast
Conversations with the people who make conversational AI 🎙️Join Millani Jayasingkam and guests as they discuss voice technology, conversation design, AI trends, and the strategy of creating effective conversational experiences. Tune in for first-hand learnings, insights, anecdotes, and sometimes jokes! Say hi and send us your questions at: voicethispod@gmail.com.
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