Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oita Coleman, Senior Advisor at the Open Voice Network Talks About User Privacy & Collecting Data on episode 178 of The Voice in Canada Podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are 20 voice applications in their portfolio. It was founded in January 2017 by Joel Wilson.

Some of the most popular ones are the Question of the Day, Kids Quiz, and Find my Phone. Matchbox creates and posts high-quality content 

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rana is an exceptional forward-looking visionary, who is the CEO of Behavioral Signals. He has spent his career working as an investor, executive, and entrepreneur with extensive experience in enterprise software, product development, strategy, business-building, and emerging markets. Rana was awarded the ‘Entrepreneur of the Month’ by CIO Magazine and the ‘US-China Pioneer’ Award by IEIE. Rana was also listed among the Top 10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017 by Huffington Post.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maya is a conversational bot that helps facilitate administrative tasks and navigates company operations using the power of voice. Maya listens to your goals, ideas, runs administrative tasks, and provides insights on what is needed to grow your idea.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brandon got the inspiration for his company back in 2016 when he went to an Amazon workshop and was introduced to voice. Brandon was always obsessed with technology and even as a child, he loved taking electronics apart but did not have an interest in putting them back together. Back when Brandon was running a content marketing agency, he got introduced to the service industry. His passion was unpacking people’s problems and helping them find solutions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy!

Blueprints are a way for anyone, including people with no coding experience, to create their own custom Alexa skills. They are like templates and there are more than 30 of them available to Canadians. To set up Blueprints, start by going to your Alexa app and clicking on the bottom right icon that says, “More” Click on Blueprints and you will get some data on what Blueprints is about. If you click on ALL, you will see the 30+ Blueprints that are available for use.

Below, Teri will talk about some of the 30+ Blueprints and share what we can do with some of them:

Custom Q&A

• Allows you to customize Alexa’s responses to questions.
• When you click on it, it gives you a sample of some things that you can do.
• You can set it up so that Alexa can give a customized answer to a certain question.

Hallmark Valentine’s Greeting

• It allows you to create some valentines greeting cards with personalized images and messages.

Countdown

• It allows you to set a customized countdown for a particular event, time, or date.
• In this Blueprint you will find an example where when you say, “Alexa, open New Year’s Countdown”, Alexa will say, “Time to get started. Hey everyone. Get ready for [The following year]” and proceed to do to the countdown to that year.

Story Quiz

• This one enables users to create a story and test their memory.
• It can be a fun one to do with kids and there is a sample Story Quiz in the Blueprint to guide you.

Flashcards

• This one can come in handy especially now that people are going back to school.
• You can create flashcards and use them to test yourself, and use Alexa to help master any subject.

Listening Quiz

• With this Blueprint you can create a skill that enables you listen and recall things.
• It can be helpful in prepping you for content.
• You just have to put in the content and Alexa will test you on the content by saying it to you.

All About Mum

• You can use this one to surprise your mum with a personalized story narrated by Alexa.
• It allows you to create an interactive story with a timeless lesson or games.

Whose Turn

• You can use this to create a skill that will help you determine whose turn it is to do something.

Trivia

• You can use this to program a trivia game on any topic that you like.

What to Do

• If you have a number of things that you need to get done, you can put them in a list, and Alexa will randomly choose for you which one to do.

Facts

• You can use this to create a personal list of facts on any topic that you want and when you ask Alexa to open the facts, she will give you those facts.

Family Jokes

• This one enables you to create a list of your favorite family jokes when you need a laugh.

How Many Days

• With this Blueprint, you can create a skill where you give Alexa an important date and she will count down the days to that event.
• If you’ve got a big event coming up like a wedding anniversary, birthday, or anything like that, this skill will act as a great reminder.

Adventure

• You can use this to create an adventure story where your child is the hero.
• You can start a new story from scratch or use an already custom-built one in the Blueprint.

Compliments

• This one will enable you to compliment people through Alexa by creating your own list of compliments.

Holiday Story

• This will allow you to create a story with a particular person as the main character.

Houseguest

• This is great for people who rent out their homes or have an AirBnB.
• It helps in guiding guests when they visit the home or AirBnB.

Yes No Maybe

• This one asks Alexa any Yes or No questions, and Alexa gives a randomly selected response.

Fortune Teller

• If you want to create a skill that will give you a glimpse into the fortune, then this is the Blueprint to use.

Santa’s Letter

• This allows you to write and send a letter to Santa, and then you can check back every day to track its progress to the north pole.

Sci-Fi

• You can create an interactive story with a Sci-Fi theme using this Blueprint.

Birthday Trivia

• This is a fun one for a birthday party. You can create a trivia game about the birthday boy or girl, which can be a lot of fun for a party.

Five Item Rush

• This one allows you to create a game where you can score your friends in this wacky categories game.

Dad Jokes

• You can create a list of dad jokes using this one.

Burns

• This one will allow you to create your own custom burns and use them to burn family members and friends.

Fairy Tale

• Used to create a prince and princess-themed tale.

Three Word Sort

• You can use it to train your brain in a topsy-turvy sorting game.

Quiz

• This one enables you to challenge your friends with open-ended questions.

Inspirations

• With this one, you can curate a list of your favorite motivational quotes.

Task Tracker

• This one is very useful for creating and managing your checklists to help you stay organized.

Baby Sitter

• If you hire baby sitters, then this is great for answering any questions your baby sitter may have about your child when you’re not around.

Sidekick

• This one is all about Alexa having your back with funny responses.

Chore Chart

• This is useful for scheduling and tracking weekly chores for your entire household.

All About Dad

• This one enables users to create a personalized story narrated by Alexa to surprise their dads.

Roommate

• It’s almost similar to the Baby Sitter Blueprint in that it enables you to create a skill that will help your roommates by providing them with all the important information they should know.

Pet Sitter

• You can use it to create a personalized skill that helps your pet sitter care for your favorite animal.

How to Use the BluePrints

• When you click on one of the many Blueprints, you will see a button at the bottom that says, “Make Your Own”
• When you click on that, you’ll go through and follow the steps Alexa gives you on the app. It will tell you to customize the skill and fill in some blanks to answer questions.
• Once you’ve done that, it will take you through how you add custom things to the database of information that you want Alexa to share with you.
• The process is very self-explanatory and it will guide up to the point where you will launch the skill in your own device.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Teri’s YouTube Channel
• Alexa Blueprints
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den
• VocalID.ai

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, James!

HereAfter is an AI platform designed to allow people to have spoken "conversations" with loved ones who have passed away, based on voice recordings taken while they are still alive. The conversations are made possible by platforms like Amazon Alexa. James is also the creator of DADBOT, a veteran tech journalist for The New York Times, and author of “Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think” His book addresses the economic, cultural, and psychological impact of conversational AI and how it’s altering our traditional perception of human consciousness.

His Tech Journalism

• He wrote about diverse technology oriented topics, from the HyperLoop to businesses using smell to lure customers into making purchases.
• From 2015, he developed an interest in Siri and Alexa because he was fascinated by the fact that what we had been learning from science fiction about personified beings who could have conversations with us was actually becoming a reality.
• He wanted to write about the two voice assistants but ended up approaching it from a different angle, instead writing about how Hello Barbie was created by a company called PullString. PullString was acquired by Apple.
• For him, writing about that was a great way to get into how to create a dialogue system and teach a computer how to talk. It led him deeper into voice technology.

Writing His Book

• When he did the Hello Barbie project, he could see that it was just the tip of the iceberg, and he could see that Amazon, Apple, and Google were battling each other in the voice technology race, and so he knew there was great potential in the space.
• He realized he couldn’t just fit everything about voice technology into an article so he decided to put it in a book.

HereAfter

• He was inspired to create it when his late father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and had a few months to live.
• James did a conventional oral history project with his father, recording him talking all about his life. He got hours of recordings and had them professionally transcribed.
• Around the same time, he was involved in conversational AI while researching for his book, and he realized that voice technology was a new way to share those recordings of his father in such a way that he could somehow hold on to him even after he had passed way.
• He created a conversational app that could be accessed on Facebook Messenger. One could create messages on the app and get audio/video clips from it. He called it the DADBOT.
• DADBOT has been the basis for everything he has worked on and created ever since.
• They are working on making HereAfter a scalable technology that anyone can use. They are on Amazon Alexa exclusively and expect to be on Google Assistant soon.
• They have received mixed feedback from the market. For example, most people want to wait before they record their memories, almost like how people always put off writing a will.

Signing Up on HereAfter

• One starts by signing up for the service, after which they are orally interviewed by someone in the company.
• The company then records the person’s life story in a very structured manner with the end product in mind.
• The audio is then edited and put into the HereAfter system so that when an end user asks a question about that person via Alexa, they hear that person’s voice answering them from the actual recording of that person.
• They are currently developing an app that will do the interviewing.
• HereAfter has positively impacted families and enabled them to capture the life stories of their loved ones for the benefit of their present and future family members.

Remembrance Versus Replication

• Science fiction movies like HER show us a world where people can have relationships with AI beings on their phones and other devices, which brings up the question of whether we could possibly continue relationships with loved ones who have passed away through technologies like HereAfter.
• James reiterates that HereAfter is just an advanced tool for remembrance rather than for replication.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• HereAfter Website
• James on Linkedin
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den
• VocalID.ai

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Dr. Arkonovich!

Dr. Arkonovich began developing Alexa skills in 2015 before the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) SDK was even released and is best known for having the top-rated Alexa skill for weather. Big Sky has over 2,500 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. That puts Big Sky in the top 20 for skill reviews overall and number one in the weather category. He comes on to talk about his experience in creating skills for Alexa and Bixby, and his award winning skill, Big Sky.

Philosophy Professor to Voice Technology Enthusiast

• A combination of trying to put off doing a research project and an Achilles tendon injury is what ultimately led him into developing an interest in voice technology, He was confined to a chair for a long time and so he was looking for things to do.
• He got an Alexa device early on and he liked the technology. He kept hacking around with it to have it do things that it wasn’t capable of doing at the time, like play music on his stereo or turn his lights on and off.

Coding Experience

• He hadn’t done any coding before he got into Alexa skill development.
• The fact that critical aspects of philosophy and coding are similar helped him in his start as a skill developer.
• He wanted to integrate Alexa into his music server software so he could tell Alexa to play his preferred songs or albums. That was when he was referred to an actual Alexa skill developer who was doing some early Alexa projects.
• The developer wrote some basic code for him, but it had some issues and he decided to fix them himself. That’s how he started self-teaching himself the necessary coding to do to the skill development.

His First Skills

• It was a lights integration skill which included color loops and timers, features that are not yet available in any Alexa skill or device.
• He would use it to control his lights.
• He also developed skills for Evernote integration, Google Calendar integrations, and other things.
• The Google Calendar integration skill is actually still available in the skill store.

Big Sky

• This is his flagship skill and it’s all about the weather.
• He created it to give him much more detailed and obscure weather information that at the time Alexa didn’t provide. Amazon has since upped their game in that regard.
• He didn’t think much about it when he published it, but then over a period of six months, people started using it and it became very popular.

Facing Skill Imitations

• He has unique features in his skill (Big Sky), but he has witnessed some concerning issues with Amazon copying some of his features into their own weather skill.
• Asking for the weather from Big Sky or Alexa is similar in certain ways, but Big Sky is much more detailed in the forecasts it provides. It, for example, analyses the weather behind the scenes to find interesting patterns like whether the chance of rain is increasing or decreasing.
• The data it provides comes from the Dark Sky API.

Takeaways From Alexa Live

• He loved the event and the features Amazon released.
• He thinks the Quick Links feature is going to be beneficial for all users including Alexa skill developers. The NFI tool kit will also be great for developers and users depending on how it will be implemented.
• Other features that he liked included Alexa Conversations (which was integrated into Big Sky).

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Dr. Steven Arkonovich on Twitter
• Big Sky
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Nick!

Nick is a 19 year veteran of the U.S coast guard who started skills development back in 2017, and a graduate from University of Phoenix with a Bachelor's Degree in Business management and Operations. He’s an independent developer who also develops for Voice Skills Inc., a company based in San Antonio.

Getting Into Voice

• Nick began as an Amazon Prime member dating back from 2005 and when Alexa first came up he ended up calling them and he received an invitation link. He went ahead and bought it and that was his first step into what he believes is the future. 
• He always had an interest and urge to explore coding and computer programming despite having a degree in business management.
• During Nick’s military career he would build databases and in time, he began to look up skills that used session management. Finally, he decided to take the leap to create Alexa skills for people to enjoy.

More About Nick’s Skills and his Personal Development

• Nick first began by creating fact based skills such as Cut, Copy and Paste.
• He believes a good voice experience is probably a 70/30 split where visual components compliment the skill and make it more desirable.

About Historical Voices

• The idea behind Historical Voices was to bring the actual voices of people who said profound important things in the past.
• The skill was created using open source content and platforms to get famous speeches such as Martin Luther King Jr.'s, "I Have A Dream".
• Nick feels it’s important to maintain the authentic voice of the speaker and capture what they actually sounded like during those impactful moments in history.
• Historical Voices has a request feature that helps in deciding which historical figure gets featured on the skill or gets added onto the database based on if the historical figure meets the required criteria.
• Currently, the Historical Voices database contains 47 different individuals and 6 different historical events.

How it Works

• Nick wanted to incorporate a gamification aspect into the skill whereby if a users used it many times, they would unlock more people in four stages, and if they used it more than 100 times, they would unlock everything.
• The skill keeps track of a user's sessions and contains reminders that give them the ability to check out if their addition was added onto the database.
• Whenever you start the skill up on a non-screen device it throws you a card with a printout of everyone that’s on the skill and that allows you to scroll through and select who you want to listen to. 

Plans For The Future

• Nick plans to expand the database with as many inspirational people as possible in order to meet users' needs and keep them engaged and entertained.
• He also hopes to make the skill into an education and reference point for people to benefit from.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Nick’s Facebook Group: Alexa & Google Assistant Voice Chat
• Nick’s Facebook Group 2: Amazon Echo Show-Now Covering Everything ALEXA
• Nick on Twitter
• Nick on Instagram
• Nick’s E-mail - commandingechos@gmail.com
• Nick’s Website
• Nick’s YouTube Channel
• Historical Voice on the US Skill Store
• Historical Voice on the Canadian Skill Store
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

They had a great discussion about how skills work, how they are invoked, and how to make sure that an Alexa skill is found in the skill store. This episode will be very resourceful if you’re looking to develop an Alexa skill or you already have one, and you’re looking for some SEO tips to get it out to the market.

Invocation Phrase Versus Skill Names

• When one enables their skill on Alexa, they have to have an invocation phrase because smart speakers are always waiting for that wake word (Alexa).
• Alexa skills are like apps. The way we have to open an app in our smartphone to interact with it, is the same way we have to open an Alexa skill with our voice. For example, to go into DetectiveX, you can’t just say, “Alexa, diffuse the bomb” You have to say, “Alexa, open DetectiveX”, and then begin to interact with it.
• In the Amazon skill store, a skill is listed with its name and the invocation phrases users can say to open it.
• When developing a skill, one should make sure that their description, keywords, and titles are optimized for SEO. It’s important to think about how people search for skills and to include that in the description.

 List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• VoiceID.ai
• AlexainCanada.ca/Community
• TheVoiceDen.com

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Arianne!

Prior to joining Amazon, she was head of automotive industry strategy at Oracle Data Cloud where she helped automotive marketers discover and implement the best possible audience strategies for their marketing efforts. Her automotive background began at JD Power, where she spent a dozen years providing direction on automotive marketing industry trends.

Getting Involved in Voice

• It all started from the auto industry for her. When she heard about the position of Chief Evangelist for Alexa Automotive, she was immediately attracted to it.
• The idea of having a great voice assistant in the car was amazing for her, and she feels the car is the most appropriate place to use a voice assistant because it strips away the complexities and minimizes distractions.
• She learned a lot since joining Amazon and she’s all about the consumer perspective of things to make sure the product always meets the needs of users.

Echo Auto

• The device allows people to bring Alexa into their car.
• It has an 8 microphone array which allows users to handle the variety of noises that exist inside the vehicle.
• It uses a cigarette lighter or USB port to get power, and connects to a phone via Bluetooth for connectivity to the cloud.
• Despite recent advances in cloud computing, machine learning and speech science, drivers consistently cite in-vehicle voice recognition among their top complaints.
• Amazon’s Alexa Auto team is addressing this gap by extending the best of Amazon Alexa into the car, and building new vehicle-specific features that make customers’ daily lives, and time spent behind the wheel, easier and more convenient.
• Their northstar for Alexa is to have it fully integrated into the vehicle experience which means having Alexa embedded into the infotainment systems of the vehicles themselves.
• They had customers sending them pictures of themselves carrying their Echo Dots into their cars.
• They have made a lot of progress in that area and are working with different companies like Pioneer to build automotive accessories and after-market car stereo that have Alexa built in to give their customers a variety of options. 
• The device uses the same amount of data as that someone would use when using their smartphone to access similar amounts of content.

Top Use Cases

• People use Alexa in their vehicles to listen to music, podcasts, and the news.
• They also use it to play games and communicate through phone calls.
• Navigation is another major use of Alexa in the car.
• People also use it for their personal needs like connecting to their smart home devices, adding reminders, or adding an item to a grocery list, and many other things.

Skills to Use in the Car

• There are a few great Alexa skills to use in the car, including, Drive Time and Song Quiz
• DriveTime is great for commutes while Song Quiz helps people to stay engaged with each other while in the car.

Adoption and The Future

• It enables people to have the same voice assistant they have at home or in the office, in their car.
• Doing things by voice in the car also ensures much more safety when people are driving.
• There’s been a great response from the market ever since they released Echo Auto and they had actually received a million requests for an invite to test it out.
• They expect the Echo Auto will meet the needs of different car owners regardless of the make and age of their cars. They anticipate that the Echo Auto will help users be productive and entertained from their vehicles for a very long time to come.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den
• Drivetime
• Song Quiz
• Arianne on Twitter

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Clint!

Budgie develops and markets Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice apps. They have five skills/actions that are currently published with more in development. Clint leverages a variety of experiences from both his creative and business background to create high production value voice and multimodal experiences. Their most famous skill at Budgie so far is Detective X, a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and Clint will talk all about it and so much more.

Journeying into Voice Technology

• When Alexa became available in Canada, he was in a place where he felt burnt out on most of his creative outlets, and so he got his first smart speaker immediately they were available and starting experimenting with voice apps.
• He realized the potential that it had and found it very exciting, but he didn’t know how to code, so he kept a notepad of voice tech ideas, and then started consuming every content he could get on voice technology.
• In 2019, the Alexa in Canada podcast featured Braden Ream from Voiceflow who explained that Voiceflow was a no-code alternative for building Alexa skills.
• Clint immediately signed up for Voiceflow and that’s how he was able to start creating voice apps.
• He started working on basic voice games and apps, and he initially made a game to learn about APIs, a sing song game to learn about capturing utterances, and an Easter egg like skill to help people learn about integrating audio files.
• He later on started taking on more ambitious projects.

Detective X

• It’s a high-production choose-your-own-adventure-style game built into a Hollywood narrative, and it’s all about detectives trying to stop a killer.
• With his background in audio production and storytelling, making interactive fiction seemed like a good fit for both his strengths and he was genuinely excited about it.
• He worked with voice actors and employed sound effects and sound tracks to create an immersive experience that was unlike anything else in the market.
• He tried watching a movie with his eyes closed and imagined what it would take to have such great audio in a movie that anyone listening to it without watching would understand and enjoy the plot. That’s the mindset he had when he started working on Detective X.

Creating Detective X

• He started with a basic storyline, the same way movie scripts are written. From there he started using the poly voices within Voiceflow to start constructing the dialogue and make up each scene.
• He voiced one of the characters himself and hired voice actors on Fiverr to voice the rest of the characters.
• He included a game saving functionality since not everyone has the time or patience to play the game straight through.
• Detective X was launched in all English speaking regions and is also available on Google Assistant.
• The game officially launched at the end of May on both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and it just so happened that the Amazon Alexa team was hosting a gaming week on their Twitch channel at the same time, so Clint got them to play Detective X and the game got a lot of positive feedback.

In-Skill Purchases

• He has given a lot of thought to it and has even tried it out on some prototype versions, but he concluded that Detective X could easily be turned episodic with different cases, different mysteries to solve, and different killers. That would be a successful approach, and so in the long term he wants the initial case of the game to be free with future cases being in an ISP pay wall.

The Future

• He’s interested in collaborating with other developers and stakeholders in the voice technology industry while also continuing to work on his own projects.
• He also plans on expanding on the Detective X universe and experiment more on visuals and APL with the Echo Show.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Voice Den
• www.BudgieVoice.com
• Budgie Voice on Linkedin
• Budgie Voice on Facebook
• Budgie Voice on Twitter
• Budgie Voice on Instagram

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Routines is one of the most powerful features that anyone can use with Alexa. It brings the level of home automation to an entirely near level and Teri will take us through all the different settings that we can currently set up for a routine in Canada.

What is a Routine?

• It is something that you can set up so that when you trigger Alexa either with a single verbal utterance, or set it up to happen automatically at certain times on certain days of the week, Alexa can go through a number of different functions all sequentially without pausing between them.
• For example, Teri has a morning routine set up so that when he says to Alexa, “Start my day”, she goes through a number of different things. She tells him the news for the day, tells him his commute time, the weather, taps into his flash briefings, and then puts on the radio.

Setting up a Routine

• Go into your app, click on the menu button (the hamburger icon), there is an option there to click on routines.
• Click on routines. There is a little plus (+) sign on the top right corner. You click on that and that’s where you can start creating your new routine.
• There are two options to creating a new routine; one is when it happens (the trigger) and the second is adding the actions (what Alexa will do when you trigger after the trigger)
• To set up the trigger, click on “when this happens” and there is a little plus (+) sign there. There are four different options; Voice, Schedule, Device, and Alarms.
• If you click on voice, then you can enter the specific phrase that will trigger the routine, for example, Teri’s morning routine is triggered when he says, “Start my day.” 
• If you click on schedule, you will click the particular time when you will want your routine to start, and there is an option to click on repeat where you can choose which days of the week you want the routine to be triggered.
• When you click on device, you will have to choose the smart home devices you use, for example, if you have a smart lock, Alexa can be triggered when you lock or unlock the door. This part of setting up a routine depends on the kind of smart home devices you have.
• When you choose to use Alarms, whenever you dismiss an alarm, Alexa will trigger the rest of the routine.

Setting up an Action

• To set up an action, you click on “Add Action”, and you have ten different options that you can select from, for actions that Alexa can take.
• The options are Alexa Says, Calendar, Device Settings, Messaging Settings, Music Settings, News, Skills, Smart Home, Sounds, Traffic, Wait, and weather.

Alexa Says Option

• When you click on that, it triggers Alexa to actually say something to you. You can choose a custom phrase and enter a phrase. This is a great way to set up a reminder at a certain time.
• You can select Good Morning so that she simply says good morning, or you can ask her to sing a song, tell a joke, or tell a story.
• You can click on the phrases option where Alexa has several sub-categories or phrases that would be appropriate for different things.
• The real power of this feature is in how one can use it to remind them to do something at a certain time.

Calendar Option

• When you click on this, Alexa will tell you what things are on your calendar.
• You trigger it by setting up your trigger, and you have three different options including she can tell you the day’s calendar by reading it, she can tell you the following day’s calendar if you want a preview of what will happen the following day, or she can read you the next event on your calendar.
• This is how you can have your agenda told to you in the morning while you’re getting ready.

Device Settings Option

• This option allows us to change, for example, the volume. For example, Teri has a routine set to reduce Alexa’s volume when he goes to bed, and back up in the morning.
• There are two other features within device settings, and that is, Do Not Disturb and Stop Audio.
• There is also a feature that enables one to use IFTTT apps, which opens up a whole world of possibilities when it comes to automation because when one connects their Amazon account to IFTTT, then there are many different companies and apps that one can connect to.

Messaging Settings Option

• You can set this such that you can receive a notification on your Alexa app (on your phone) at a particular time.
• You can also set it up to send announcements. Announcements are things that Alexa will say and they get announced verbally on all the devices in your account.

Music Settings Option

• You can set up Alexa to play a particular song or playlist.
• You type in what you want and choose what provider (Spotify, Amazon Music, your library, etc.), and then set a time limit if you want, so that the music will play for a certain period of time and then stop.

News Option

• This is valuable. When you click News and enable it, it asks Alexa to automatically start playing your flash briefings. You have to have your flash briefings set up.

Skills Option

• This is a way that one can have Alexa trigger a skill to begin without the user having to ask Alexa to start that skill. One can choose any particular skill and Alexa can start it automatically in the routine.

Smart Home Option

• This is where you can control a particular device or group.
• Once you click on Smart Home, you will see those two options. You can click on “Control Device” and there you can click on a particular device like a light bulb or switch. Based on that smart home device, there may be particular options that you can enable.

Sounds Option

• This is a new feature and it allows the user to play various sounds, for example, when one gets home and they tell Alexa, “I’m home”, Alexa can play an applause sound.

Traffic Option

• This is where Alexa reports your traffic to you. There aren’t any options to set up here other than enabling it.

Wait Option

• This is for when you want Alexa to do something in your routine and then wait a particular length of time before moving on to the next step in the routine.

Weather Option

• Here, Alexa will report your weather based on your location.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• How to Setup Amazon Alexa Routines in Canada
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• VoiceID.ai
• IFTTT.com
• AlexainCanada.ca/Community
• TheVoiceDen.com

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Mark!

Mark Tucker is a software developer and architect with over 25 years’ experience. He started his voice-tech journey in 2016 when there were only 4,000 skills in the Alexa Skills Store, and has worked at 2 startups creating innovative voice experiences for customers. Mark finds time to create his own Alexa Skills and Bixby Capsules, and is the organizer of the Phoenix Alexa Meetup and the Phoenix Chapter of the Ubiquitous Voice Society.

He has spoken at conferences including the Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Expo, The Alexa Conference, Voice Summit, and Project Voice. Mark is the creator of Speech Markdown which he released as open source and can be found at SpeechMarkDown.org. He enjoys finding ways for non-profits to benefit from voice-first. He has a passion for family, voice technology and serving others.

Getting Into Voice

• His first run in with voice technology when was he was a teenager. He had just received his first home computer and it had a voice synthesis module which could say about 80 words or phrases. He found that very cool.
• He learned how to do programming on that computer and later in high school advanced his programming knowledge.
• He has been involved in technology ever since and most of his skills are self-taught.
• He came across Alexa in 2016 when there were about 3,000 skills in the US Skills store. He started by mastering all sorts of things from Amazon Web Services to all their cloud services.
• When he got into Alexa development, he fell in love with the conversational nature of the technology and the fun experiences that one can build with it.
• Number Spies is the most ambitious project that he’s ever done and it had been an idea in his head for more than a year.

The Idea For Number Spies and How it Works

• He came across the concept of a number station, which spies used to communicate during the Cold War and World War 2, and he was fascinated by it.
• One spy would use a short wave radio to transmit a series of digits and the other spy tuned to that frequency would be able to hear the digits, but they couldn’t decode the message unless they had the one-time pad that was similar to the one the sender had. That made the message an unbreakable cypher.
• Mark learned more about that and he used some features of that concept in creating Number Spies. For example, the game produces poly-generated numbers that sound like it’s a real radio transmission. He had to mix down files together on the back end and he now has a content management system where he has can put in a message and it will encode it. The system then builds a file that can be listened to through a flash briefing.
• One can then go to a website and enter the numbers they have heard, and that can help them figure out what the secret was if they have the corresponding one-time pad.
• One can choose to manually decode a message or ask Alexa to help make the process faster.
• When one manually decodes the message they get more points.

Playing the Game

• The player takes on the role of a spy, Agent 313, who is brand new to the agency.
• The game gives the new player a walk through as part of their initial briefing after which they will be sent to spy school so they can understand the main commands they will need to use to play the game. After that, the player can start the game.
• The player can also go to the website where all the commands are listed.
• They can play at least two or three times a week decoding messages and solving puzzles.
• Inside the messages that the player has to decode, they can be told to visit a country or city, and travelling there can earn them points.
• Everything that happens in the game is tied to a certain day so the player has to play, decode the message, and complete their mission within 24 hours.
• The game also has levels and as the player moves up the levels, the missions they go on become harder and more complex.
• The player can go into a different mission every 90 minutes from when they successfully complete another one.
• There is in-skill purchasing that the player can do. For example, they need money to travel to their different locations depending on where they travel.
• The agency that one belongs to is based out of Washington, D.C. and so the farther one travels the costlier it is. The more missions one completes, the more money they get.
• When they run out of money, they can purchase more money.
• One has to use an alias when they’re travelling and so at the beginning of the game, the game creates an auto-alias for the player and then as they play the game they can create other aliases for themselves.
• The goal of playing the game is to become a master spy.
• There are many fun and entertaining aspects of the game that make it so awesome to play.

 List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Number Spies Online
• Number Spies on Facebook
• Number Spies on Twitter
• Mark on Twitter

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Ian Utile!

Ian is an innovative strategist, business development executive, entrepreneur, optimistic tech futurist, and keynote speaker. He is also the co-founder of Kukui Corp, a company ranked by Inc 500 as the #1 fastest growing private organizations in San Jose (#76 in the US). He specializes in starting software tech companies and is a partner in different non-tech projects.

He is the founder of WMVAI (We Magnify Voice for Attention and Influence), a B2B SaaS platform to automate posting content to Amazon Alexa which will in future include Google Home/Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Samsung Bixby. His hobby is supporting large international non-profits. Teri did this live interview with Ian because they’re discussing live audio on Alexa.

His Vision for the Future

• He highlights that we as humanity are most likely to benefit from machine learning (AI) in voice technology, and feels that it’s logical that the current technologies will end for the good of humanity.
• He refers to the different science fiction movies and TV shows that dive into future predictions of technologies and how they will impact humanity, with a lot of them predicting the doom of technologies like AI taking over the world.
• But Ian sees voice technology as a great tool that people can use to improve their lives.

Attention Live

• Through the thought process of creativity and innovation, Ian spent the last few years building Attention Live.
• His idea was to build one thing (some kind of device on any platform) that he could speak to/through and what he would say would go out on all voice devices, social media platforms, and other channels. This is meant to solve a huge problem for content creators, and also enable consumers to access and consume content much more easily.
• Attention Live is the only software in the world that enables people to livestream to Amazon’s Alexa devices in real time. They are also the only software that can livestream to YouTube with audio in real time.
• Attention Live will decentralize things for creators and their consumers because they won’t have to go through platforms like Facebook or YouTube that hinder them from achieving their core goals.
• That is a big part of what drives Ian because he believes in a decentralized future with voice-first not touch-first.
• Attention Live will basically be a platform where people can create their content, stream it live to all platforms, and have proven ownership of the content they will produce.
• That will therefore enable the content creators to easily make money from their content.

Current State of Affairs with Attention Live

• They are creating a category that doesn’t exist (live podcasting), which is very unique and ambitious, and Ian approached the go-to-market strategy differently than he has ever approached anything.
• He decided to go out and interview every single person he possibly could in the voice tech and blockchain world.
• He has interviewed approximately 200 leaders in voice tech and 150 in blockchain. He has also led dozens of events, helped co-produce a dozen or more events, and created thousands of hours of content.
• That was a very unique way of going about developing the company because he realized he needed all the wisdom and insights of the voice tech and blockchain industries.
• He cannot give exact dates on when people will be able to access and use the platform, but they still need work on it more so they can have a proper launch.
• They currently have a beta version that they’re offering to a select few to test out.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Attention Live
• Ian on Linkedin
• Ian on Twitter
• Ian on Facebook
• Ian on Instagram
• The Voice Den

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Drew!

Drew spent 25 years in IT but felt he needed to get back to coding, the love of which had drawn him to technology in the first place. When Amazon introduced Echo in the UK, he was a senior IT architect and he knew he’d found just the opportunity he needed to sharpen his skills, and build a rewarding new career as a voice developer. Working in management felt like he was getting farther away from what he really loved to do, so he began looking for a way to get back to his technical roots, and that’s when Alexa appeared.

He actually did far more than revive his coding skills; he left the corporate world to work for himself as an Alexa skills developer. In under two years, he has published 30 engaging game skills for Alexa in several languages, attracting over 65,000 active monthly users. As the winner of multiple prizes in the UK’s monthly Alexa contest, Cosgrove says building skills for Alexa has changed his life.

Background

• He used to work with O2, the UK mobile phone company, and then worked as an IT consultancy before becoming a full-time Alexa skills developer.
• He creates his games independently and some of his skills are top ranked in Canada.

His Top Skills

• Feel the Pressure is one of his Alexa Games that are very popular in Canada.
• Another one is Animal Letters, and this one is never really finished because he keeps improving and changing it by adding more animals, sound effects, and more functionality.
• He also keeps improving on Feel the Pressure and it has different voices depending on the location, for example, the voice is different in the UK than it is in the US.

Developing Skills and the Associated Challenges

• The first challenge he didn’t realize when he started was speech recognition. The technology is much better now than it was in the past, but it’s not perfect. When it works, it’s magical, but when it doesn’t work, it’s terrible.
• When someone speaks to a smart speaker and it doesn’t understand them, it can be frustrating, and that concerned Drew a lot because his Alexa games rely heavily on speech recognition.
• A huge amount of his efforts go towards ensuring that he compensates for any speech recognition issues. He does that through a lot of testing.

Making Money in the Space

• Alexa developers have two ways of making money, namely, by being rewarded by Amazon or through in-skill purchases.
• The Amazon rewards program does not apply to skills that are available in Canada.
• In-skill purchases is where users pay a small fee to use a skill. Some of Drew’s skills go for 99 cents. Users can also buy some functionalities.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Animal Letters
• Feel the Pressure
• The Daily Question
• Drew's Email - Animal.Letters@Gmail.com
• Drew on Twitter

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy!

We are living in very challenging times right now with the COVID-19 pandemic, and we are all spending more time at home than ever before which has led to an increased use of voice assistants. Teri will talk about the five skills that his family uses on a regular basis. They include games and many other ways that they use Alexa for entertainment.

And The Teri Fisher Top Five Skills Are:

#1 - Question of the Day

• This is super fun and the best trivia skill so far in Teri’s opinion.
• It works by asking the user a multiple point question and then keeps track of how the user is doing, gives them points, keeps track of the users streaks, and so much more.
• It's a very fun way of learning some random facts.
• When someone gets their question right, the skill gives them a bonus question. It even has badges that users earn.
• There are lots of gamification aspects to the skill that makes a user want to keep playing.
• It was made by MatchBox.io
• It’s invocation word is, “Alexa, start Question of the Day” or “Alexa, enable Question of the Day”

#2 - Would You Rather?

• This is a game that gives the user a random question, for example, “Would you rather itch all the time or sneeze all the time?”
• Multiple people can play the game together at the same time.
• It has different categories, including General, Magic, and Hogwarts.
• It gives users the answers in terms of what most people say.

#3 - Kid’s Court

• It was done by Pretzel Labs and its awesome especially for kids because Alexa acts as a judge, and she helps to give a judgement on different situations that may be happening at home.
• The user goes to judge Alexa and she rules on something that has happened, typically when kids are fighting or not getting along. They can each state their case, defend themselves, and even learn some law concepts in the process.
• The command for it is, “Alexa, open Kid’s Court”

#4 - Song Quiz

• The command for it is, “Alexa, open Song Quiz”
• It’s a name-a-tune type of skill/game.
• A user can choose the number of players they want and if they’re playing alone, the skill can match them up to play with someone else in the world.
• One can choose music from different decades and it plays a short segment of a song so one can name the title and artist. If one gets both the title and artist right, they get bonus points.
• It’s very well produced and has lots of great sound effects built into it.

#5 - Akinator

• The command for it is, “Alexa, open Akinator”
• It guesses who the user is thinking of and it does that by asking the user a series of questions.
• It amazingly correctly guesses who someone is thinking of most of the time.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• VoiceID.ai
• AlexainCanada.ca/Chat
• Question of the Day
• Would You Rather?
• Kid’s Court
• Song Quiz
• Akinator
• TheVoiceDen.com

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He will be using his drums to illustrate some of the concepts by using them as voices.

Enjoy!

The Evolution of Technology

• Technology has evolved from a keyboard as a way to interface with the computer, to a mouse, and then to a touch screen. Now we are getting to a point where we can speak to a computer.
• There are five main reasons why Teri feels that voice will be the next operating system and he will use a concept based on the five letters of VOICE to explain that.

V for Versatility

• According to Teri’s concept, the V in VOICE stands for Versatile. This means that when one is using their voice, they can do multiple things at once. For example, one can use their voice while driving, cooking, or doing a host of other tasks. That kind of versatility is a key concept of voice.
• Teri will play some very entertaining drum beats, and while we are listening, we should note the fact that each of us will still be doing some kind of task. Listening to the drum beats will not disrupt us from doing what we are doing. That’s the same way that voice will work.

Omnipresence

• This means that voice can be all around us no matter where we are or what we’re doing. One doesn’t need to be looking in the direction of where a voice is coming from to hear it or be aware of it.
• Teri will play the drums again to illustrate how sound can be all around us.

 I for Innate

• The first way we communicate when we’re born is through our voices. When we are born, the first thing we do is cry, and we have to learn all other types of communication like read, type, and write, but using the voice is the most innate way that we know how to communicate.

C for Contextual

• This means that when someone says something they can either sound happy or sad.
• Voice allows us to distinguish emotions just from the sound of it. An example of what this means is when someone reads a text message or email, and misinterprets what is being said because they can’t really hear the emotion of the writer.
• One cannot tell if someone is being sarcastic, funny, or mean from their texts or emails, but with voice, one can hear someone’s emotion when they speak.

E for Efficient

• The average person can type about 40 words per minute and speak about 150 words per minute. That’s about a three to four times faster rate of speaking than typing. Voice is therefore extremely efficient, and when a technology is efficient, it tends to be adopted more rapidly.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• The Alexa in Canada Community

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Bianca!

Bianca is also the host of the Voice of Law Podcast and she advocates for a future where telemedicine will allow for access to healthcare no matter where one lives, where wearables will allow people to predict the onset of disease before it happens, and where clinical outcomes will be improved due to precision and personalized medicine. She believes that the digital health future should balance the needs of both patients and healthcare providers by placing evidence-based approaches and civil rights considerations at the core of digital health law-making. She aims to be a prominent voice for a Digital Health School of Thought founded on these principles.

The Legal Perspective of What’s Going On with COVID-19

• She’s been reading articles around how governments have been tracking and tracing people’s movements to curb the spread of the Coronavirus, and she’s also read articles arguing that the tracking and tracing is a breach of people’s privacy and civil liberties.
• She’s been investigating all that and looking at the international covenant on civil and political rights on how emergencies like the current pandemic are supposed to be dealt with in regard to people’s liberties. She’s actually working with a prominent lawyer in the field and they will be publishing their findings soon.

Online Events and Webinars

• She’s been taking note that everyone is now using telemedicine and she recalls when she used to talk about how advantageous it would be for healthcare, but doctors would laugh at her. People are now utilizing telemedicine out of necessity which is a good thing.
• She’s been attending a lot of Zoom meetings and webinars, and she’s excited for what Teri is putting together with the Voice Den.
• The Voice Den is something that Teri is creating to bring the basics of an in-person event into the online events and webinars that people have been doing. It like a reality TV Show but it will be done virtually, and it will bring on five mystery voice industry influencers, and an audience/participants. The audience will have an opportunity to ask popular questions and engage in a huge way and learn from the influencers.
• One of the influencers will be Bianca and she is so excited about it.

Voice Technology During the Pandemic

• She’s liked how the voice community has come together to talk about the response to COVID-19 and the role that voice is playing in it.
• Digital health is currently coming together with the use of telemedicine, voice technologies, and AI in healthcare. She believes it’s going to be a new world after the pandemic.

Using Telemedicine

• Teri has been using telemedicine while working from home.
• He has come across some limitations like when he has to examine a patient can’t because they're in different locations, so they have to make some kind of plan to deal with that. The patients seem to love the telemedicine because it’s so convenient.
• Bianca feels it’s time to move into the 21st century and utilize digital health. She has noted that there are a lot of studies being done to look into telemedicine and how it works in different contexts. There are more than 30,000 research papers and people are using that research especially during the current crisis.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Electronic Health Consulting Group
• Bianca on Linkedin
• Bianca on Twitter
• Bianca’s Ambassador Profile on Digital Health Today
• The Voice Den

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen in and Learn!

Lucien is an extraordinarily talented and creative filmmaker, pianist and a vital member of the Alexa in Canada team. When he is not busy capturing the best content and producing premier videos for Alexa in Canada, he and his team are creating videos to build brands. His motto is: “Let’s tell your story right, 1 video, 1 podcast, 1 post at a time.” He has been studying and playing piano for 20 years and is becoming well known for teaching piano online. He’s also very successful on TikTok.

The Discoveries

• At first he thought he did something wrong because he couldn’t locate his flash briefing online but he realized that he had registered it under the US. That means that all his content will be set up for the US. He will have to go to his Alexa skill developer console and create a new skill where he will choose English-Canada so that his flash briefing will be available in Canada.
• He also needed to figure out the invocations he needed to say for his flash briefing.

Creating Content

• He has all the necessary equipment and software, and all he needs to focus on is creating content to teach people about piano.
• He wants to create some bite sized information to teach people things like how to sit at the piano, the proper hand positions, how to make loud sounds and soft sounds, and other beginner level things.
• He is incorporating the actual piano sounds related to what he’s teaching as he talks, which creates a more natural learning environment.
• His strategy is to be recording a video doing whatever he’s teaching and then stripping the audio to create different forms of content including video, audio, and written content.
• He has created a list of content that he wants to outline so he can have a great pipeline of authentic content.
• Teri will share his expertise on how to create great content and how he creates his content in batches.
• Teri uses a paid plan on Otter.ai to transcribe his audio content so he can create show notes for each of his flash briefing which makes that whole process much easier.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• AlexainCanada on YouTube
• VocalID.ai
• The Voice Den
• www.Otter.ai
• EasyPianoHacks.com
• Easy Piano Hacks on YouTube

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen in and Learn!

Lucien is an extraordinarily talented and creative filmmaker, pianist and a vital member of the Alexa in Canada team. When he is not busy capturing the best content and producing premier videos for Alexa in Canada, he and his team are creating videos to build brands. His motto is: “Let’s tell your story right, 1 video, 1 podcast, 1 post at a time.” He has been studying and playing piano for 20 years and is becoming well known for teaching piano online. He’s also very successful on TikTok.

Purpose of His Flash Briefing

• Lucien wants to set up his own flash briefing to give daily advice to people who want to learn piano.
• He hopes it will help people become better musicians.
• His flash briefing will be geared towards beginners who are just starting out with learning piano.
• He has discovered that a lot of adults and kids are learning piano through apps, and so he is very confident that these are the people who will form a majority of his flash briefing audience.
• He has a lot of credentials and a strong background in piano playing which makes him a qualified teacher in the area.

Where He’s At

• He has gone through Teri’s Flash Briefing Formula course and he currently knows how to record and upload his flash briefing.
• He has a logo and a considerable batch of content, and all he wants to know is how to put up the RSS feed and other things.
• He’s going to name his flash briefing “Easy Piano Hacks”
• Teri asked him to check into his description and his Alexa developer account, which he already has, and so Teri advised him on where he will host his audio.
• Teri advised him on how he can rewrite his description to include keywords that people are searching for and incorporate them in the description to improve on his SEO in Amazon. He also advised him to include a paragraph about himself so people can know how to reach him and so he can improve on his credibility.
• Lucien has been thinking about doing a length of 3 to 4 minutes for his flash briefings and Teri highlights that Amazon’s limit is 9 to 10 minutes, though the surveys he has done with his audience show that most listeners prefer flash briefings that are under 3 minutes.
• Teri will advise him on the importance of having a sonic brand for his flash briefing and recommend Trebble.FM as the hosting service.
• Once he puts one episode of his flash briefing onto Amazon, he has to wait 48 hours for Amazon to certify the flash briefing.
• Teri will also advise him on how he can submit his flash briefing content to multiple regions.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• AlexainCanada on YouTube
• VocalID.ai

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy!

Roger is the Senior Developer Evangelist at Viv Labs which develops the conversational AI technology that powers Samsung Bixby. He has been working in tech for over 20 years as a consultant, technical architect and strategist, and founder of a voice startup. A big-picture thinker and achiever, Roger is passionate about using technology as an enabler of great people experiences. An accomplished speaker and a proven thought-leader, He enjoys sharing his fountain of knowledge with others and has presented at some of the most prominent voice and AI conferences in America, including Voice Summit, Project Voice, Samsung SDC, Dreamforce and VMWorld.

Teri hosted the webinar on March 25th, and it was all about voice technology and the Coronavirus, and how we can use this technology to help us in what we are experiencing today. He had several speakers and Roger spoke about voice assistants, mental health, and pandemics, and how we can use various types of skills to help with the sense of loneliness, isolation, and some mental health issues that are already cropping up because people are isolated.

The Coronavirus and How Voice Can Help

• There has been a rise in different mental health issues because of the isolation people have been under and Roger has been looking into how we can use the voice assistants in our homes and smartphones to help with this. Some of the way include:

Social Connection

• The first benefit of voice assistants is that they can help people connect through both voice and video calls. Smart speakers are better conference call tools than our phones, and with video calling, for example, when one person has a smart speaker with a screen, another person can video call them with their smart speaker by saying, “Alexa, call [That Person’s Name]”

Exercising

• Exercising during this time can help in a big way with maintaining good mental health while in isolation and there are several voice experiences on different voice assistants that one can use to help with exercising. Roger uses the “7-Minute Workout” experience on Alexa.

Meditation

• There are meditation tools that can help one relax and take things easy in the midst of the distressing times we are in now. Voice assistants can teach someone how to meditate or give one guided meditation lessons. They include Headspace Meditation on Alexa and Google, Mindless Meditation on Bixby, Calm Meditation on Google Assistant, and Guided Meditation on Alexa.

Sleep

• Sleeping better is also critical at this time, and there are several ambient sound skills, capsules, and actions that are available to help people sleep. They include Sleep Sounds and Healing.FM.

Entertainment and Games

• Another way to stay sane during isolation is through family games and there are several great multi-player voice experiences (games) for families to play. They include Word Tennis on Alexa, Song Quiz by Volly, Would You Rather? and Trivial Pursuit on Alexa.
• Voice assistants can keep people entertained from the confines of their homes through skills like Escape the Room (The voice version of an escape room), Feel the Pressure, The Vortex, Tempers Rising, and Question of the Day.

Learning

• With all the time that we have on our hands due to the isolation, we can take that time to learn new things, and there are skills like Make Me Smart on Alexa and Learn Something Radio. Kids can use learning experiences like 1-2-3 Math, Kid’s Quiz, Bamboo, STEM Party, and Kid’s Court.

Cooking

• People are having to home cook meals a lot more now that they’re in isolation and there are skills that can help people cook much more easily.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• 7-Minute Workout (Alexa)
• 5 Minute Plank (Google Assistant)
• Senior Squat Workout (Alexa)
• Senior Workout (Bixby)
• Freeze Dance (Alexa)
• Freeze Dance (Bixby)
• Animal Workout on Alexa
• Headspace (Alexa)
• Calm Meditation (Google Assistant)
• Guided Meditations (Alexa)
• Sleep Sounds (Alexa)
• Healing.FM
• Word Tennis on Alexa
• Song Quiz by Volley (Alexa and Google)
• Would You Rather? (Alexa)
• Trivial Pursuit (Alexa)
• Make Me Smart (Alexa)
• 1-2-3 Math (Alexa)
• Kid’s Quiz! (Alexa)
• Bamboo Math (Alexa)
• STEM Party (Alexa)
• Kid’s Court (Alexa)
• Escape the Room (Alexa)
• Feel the Pressure (Alexa)
• The Vortex (Alexa)
• Question of the Day (Alexa)
• Roger on Twitter
• Roger on Linkedin

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy the Conversation!

Teri is a sports exercise physician and clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the founder of Voice First Health, the leading podcast about the intersection of voice first technology and healthcare. He is also the founder of Alexa in Canada, the leading Amazon Alexa resource for Canadians.

He is an award winning TEDx and keynote speaker, Amazon Alexa champion, educator, consultant, podcaster and briefcaster who loves sharing his excitement for artificial intelligence and voice first technology. He is the host of both his podcasts, and the daily Voice in Canada flash briefing, which is the number one rated Amazon Alex flash briefing and new skill in Canada.

Becoming an Alexa Champion

• Teri was recently named an Alexa champion due to his last few years of content development around Amazon Alexa and voice technology in general. 
• He started the Alexa in Canada podcast, Voice in Canada flash briefing, and the Voice First Health Podcast to help grow the voice technology community and get people excited about the possibilities around what Alexa can do for them and society as a whole.
• He has also helped people develop their own flash briefings through his flash briefing course.
• All his content was picked up by Amazon and they wanted to recognize him for it.

Crack the Code Gamified Flash Briefing

• It’s been a fun game that Teri has been doing and he recently did its second round.
• The first time he did it, it was as a thank you to his listeners, podcast guests, and sponsors.
• He wanted it to be a flash briefing but since flash briefings don’t allow for a two-way conversation, he created an accompanying Alexa skill, which he called Crack the Code.
• To play the game, listeners have to listen to the Voice in Canada flash briefing every day so they can hear the clue or puzzle Teri shares.
• They then have to solve the clue or puzzle and go to the Crack the Code skill, talk to Alexa, and then find out if they got the correct answer to the clue or puzzle.
• Alexa then gives them a small little piece of the final code.
• If they do that every day for the duration of the contest, then they get all the pieces to say the final code to Alexa. If they crack the code, Alexa gives them the information on how to enter to win a big prize package.
• The last Crack the Code contest went on for 10 days and Teri got a lot of great feedback from participants. Close to 900 people entered the contest and 51 actually solved the code and were given a variety of prizes.
• The contest was sponsored by AudioBurst, Trinity Audio, Treble.FM, VoiceXP, Voice Summit, and Amazon.
• The previous Crack the Code had gone on for 14 days and the feedback he got is that 14 days was a little too long.
• The contest created a voice marketing funnel for Teri because when people listened to the flash briefing and played the game, they would ultimately enter their email address which enabled Teri to build his email list.

Marketing the Flash Briefing

• When he first started his flash briefing, he had had his podcast for a few months and a bit of an audience, which helped attract listeners to the flash briefing.
• There was nothing else in Canada in terms of Alexa related content so Canadians who were interested in Alexa could quickly access his website because it ranked high on Google. That also helped build his brand.
• Earlier on, he promoted the flash briefing on his podcast and blog.

Being Influenced By Gary Vee

• Teri first heard about voice technology from Gary Vaynerchuk and Gary has been a huge influence on him.
• A lot of people in the voice technology industry are influenced by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Building a Team Around his Brand

• Teri realized that with his full time job, he needed help in doing more video content and sharing out his content on a wider scale.
• He was lucky to get a videographer and digital marketing strategist.
• He had them both with him at Project Voice to capture as much content as possible so he could produce valuable, entertaining, and educational content for the voice community.
• Distributing that content helps to build his own brand.

Sonic Branding

• As we go into the voice first era, sonic branding will be critical for every business.
• It’s all about what a brand sounds like.
• Teri recently worked with Audrey Arbeeney of Audiobrain to create his sonic branding based on his interests and character.

Using Voice in His Daily Life

• He hasn’t actually incorporated voice in his practice due to the data security, privacy, and other issues surrounding voice.
• He is very interested in using Alexa and Alexa devices as educational tools for health education.
• At home, he uses Alexa for routines, flash briefings, home automation, and his kids have fun playing games.
• He also experiments with skills he can create.
• He is excited about the potential for how voice assistants can be used in the home and how homes will become like little satellite medical clinics as the technology get better.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The COVID-19 Informational Webinar
• Learn How to Create Your Own Flash Briefing
• The Alexa in Canada Podcast
• The Voice First Health Podcast

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's Do This!

With the epidemic leading to people being told to practice social distancing, Teri has been considering how voice technology can lessen the problems people are facing with that. He will share the five different ways that he thinks voice technology can have a profound impact on what we are experiencing today with the epidemic. Some of the solutions are futuristic but they have a lot of potential going forward.

And the Five Ways Are:

#1 - Voice Enabling Diverse Gadgets

• This is voice enabling gadgets that we touch every day including kiosks, ATMs, elevator controls, and others. This is already being done today and it definitely helps with curbing the spread of the coronavirus.

#2 - A Coronavirus Flash Briefing

• This would be very beneficial in delivering accurate information about what is happening with the virus globally. Teri is launching the Coronavirus tips to keep people informed, up-to-date, and current with evidence-based, proven and good information.

#3 - General Information Skill

• Teri has already created a skill that provides general information about COVID-19 and it’s called “Coronavirus Doc” and it’s on the Alexa Skill Store. He is also working on launching it on Samsung Bixby. The skill covers information such as general info about the Coronavirus, how it’s transmitted, some of the symptoms, how to avoid contracting it, and other things.

#4 - Voice Doctor

• This is futuristic but we are already seeing hints of it. In this case, a voice assistant would act a little bit like a doctor and would ask the user questions like, “Do you have a fever? Do you have a cough? Do you have trouble breathing? Have you been exposed to someone who has the virus?”, and those sorts of questions. Then based on the responses, the voice assistant will use its algorithm to determine your risk level of having the Coronavirus. The voice assistant would then order a home test kit for you if the risk is high enough, so you could test yourself at home, and you could discuss the results with the voice assistant in such a way that you will start to obtain your medical information and care at home.

#5 - Epidemic Management

Teri believes that voice technology could help with the management of an epidemic like Coronavirus in the future through voice assistants serving as home-based healthcare providers. A great scenario is if one was diagnosed with the Coronavirus and they had a skill that would monitor how they are doing, ask them to rate their symptoms, look for patterns, and other things.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• Coronavirus Tips Flash Briefing
• VoiceFirstHealth.com/Live
• Teri's TEDx Talk

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Enjoy the Conversation!

Teri is a sports exercise physician and clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the founder of Voice First Health, the leading podcast about the intersection of voice first technology and healthcare. He is also the founder of Alexa in Canada, the leading Amazon Alexa resource for Canadians. He is an award winning TEDx and keynote speaker, Amazon Alexa champion, educator, consultant, podcaster and briefcaster who loves sharing his excitement for artificial intelligence and voice first technology. He is the host of both his podcasts, and the daily Voice in Canada flash briefing, which is the number one rated Amazon Alex flash briefing and new skill in Canada.

Early Inspiration

• Teri had an interest in voice tech from a young age when he used to play with radio control cards.
• He had an interest in digital photography, video editing, audio, and music.
• He was very much involved in the creative space as he was growing up. His mother is a music therapist and she trained as a professional musician.
• She made sure Teri learned how to play the violin from age three all the way to high school. He also developed an interest in percussion instruments somewhere along the way and has been a drummer and percussionist for many years.
• As he was listening to podcasts, he heard about Amazon Alexa and he discovered that it was not in Canada.
• He started researching online for information on voice technology, but couldn’t find anything on the technology’s presence in Canada. So he thought he should combine his passion for technology, healthcare, education, and create a resource for people to learn about the technology.

The Role Being an MD Has Played

• He has a strong science formal educational background, and part of that is being able to critically look at things, synthesize information, and determine how something can help people.
• From his research, he determined that the computer science behind voice technology had some similarities to the science background that he has had.

Flash Briefings 101

• Teri thinks of them as cousins to podcasts.
• They are the prime real estate of voice because they are the easiest way for any content producer to enter into voice technology, create content, develop an intimate relationship with the audience, and become an authority in whatever area they’re passionate about.
• There are about 12,000 briefcasters compared to 700,000 podcasters, signifying that there is a tremendous opportunity in flash briefings
• Most people enjoy listening to flash briefings that are around 2 minutes in length, and they tend to be listened to during transitional moments of the day like getting ready in the morning.
• Flash briefings are easy to play. Once someone has them enabled, they just invoke the flash briefings name, and it gets much easier because they just have to say, “Play my news”
• Teri loves the fact that people are impacted by flash briefing content. He has been able to develop a community around his Voice in Canada flash briefing.
• He gets frequent feedback and reviews on his flash briefing.
• An interesting fact is that a lot of his audience is visually impaired, and that lends itself to the fact that voice technology is such an inclusive type of technology where one doesn’t have to be looking at anything to get content or initiate it.

How Teri Learned Everything About Flash Briefings

• With his formal training as a physician, he’s familiar with the constant change of information.
• It’s always the responsibility of the physician to be on top of new research and information, and he approached learning about flash briefings the same way.
• He went through a lot of the Amazon developer information and manuals that are there, and with his previous podcasting experience, he was able to start doing flash briefings.
• His background in sound, audio, and music also helped in a huge way in him creating his flash briefing.
• Amazon has made the process of developing flash briefings easier.

All About Alexa in Canada

• It’s a website and resource where people go to learn how to get more out of Alexa.
• He also highlights skills that are available in Canada.
• He also has a list of common Alexa commands, tutorials, and links to the Voice in Canada flash briefing on the website.
• He has the Flash Briefing Formula course that covers everything from how to come up with a flash briefing idea to how to launch it. It has screenshots and explainer videos.

Strategies and Tips for Starting a Flash Briefing

• Teri advices that if one is going to do it, then they must commit to it and be consistent.
• Lack of consistency damages a brand and confuses the listener. It sends the message that one is unreliable.
• One has to define a specific consistency for their flash briefing. It could be daily or weekly, but one must stick to whatever schedule they’ve come up with.
• Another important thing to consider is what problem one can solve for someone with the flash briefing. People find that valuable and it helps with listener engagement.

The Impact of AI and Voice on Healthcare

• Teri feels AI and voice will impact healthcare in every single way we can imagine.
• People are no longer going to be tied down to a physical device. They will have an ambient computing device that will listen to them.
• It will be easy for patients to interact with the technology to get help with their health, for example, the technology will act as a physician and ask someone about their symptoms so it can diagnose their issue.
• Personalized medical care using AI and voice technology will become a reality in future.
• Teri is currently working on a Corona Virus skill (Corona Virus Doc) that will give people the information they need to help guide them on everything about the virus.

Leveraging Voice Tech

• People should get a presence on voice either for their passion projects, businesses, or organizations.
• Teri believes that the easiest way to do that is a flash briefing.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Vocal ID
• Learn How to Create Your Own Flash Briefing
• The Alexa in Canada Podcast
• The Voice First Health Podcast
• VoiceFirstHealth.com/Live
• Teri on Linkedin
• The Voice Technology in Healthcare Book

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Patrick!

Patrick is the lead development of VaynerMedia's global voice-first marketing programs, creating some of the most widely used interactive voice experiences for Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, and developing a first-of-its-kind Voice AOR model to integrate these emerging channels into client business strategies from inception.

Prior to joining VaynerMedia in 2016, Patrick led innovations strategy, brand planning, and client relationships at some of the world's leading advertising agencies, developing innovative marketing products, brands, and new businesses for clients ranging from Fortune 500s to new-to-world startups. As a speaker, he's addressed the values of a "user-led, technology-enabled," approach to innovation at events such as SXSW, AdWeek, Social Media Week, and many more.

How VaynerMedia Got Involved in Voice

• It all arose very organically. One of their largest clients (Diageo) wanted help in extending a program (their Johnnie Walker’s Digital Mentorship) they were doing, and voice came up as one of the best solutions. They tried it out and saw some real traction both in terms of number of users and the quantity of skills and discovery.
• They saw people spend a lot of time with that voice experience, and that helped them learn where people were going when using the experience.
• From there, they started offering the same voice service to other clients.
• They are on the Alexa Development Advisory Council, and spend a lot of time working closely with the Alexa platform so they can express the needs and desires of the clients they represent.

Creating the Johnnie Walker Experience

• They started by going to several whiskey tasting sessions and recording them.
• While the whole experience could be read in text or watched in video, the personalities of the masters of whiskey was what Patrick and his team resonated with the most.
• They put out the voice experience they created in form of text-to-speech, and not recorded voice.
• The elements of personality were obvious and important, and they tried to address that as much as they could through copywriting. They did have versions where they used voices.

The Way Brands See Voice in Their Overall Marketing Strategies

• Voice has become a key focus for brands especially in 2020.
• From 2017 to 2018, VaynerSmart was doing a lot of design and development of third-party voice apps. This is still a meaningful part of their business, but the focus has increasingly been shifting to more of strategy and consultation.
• As they engage more in consulting, they help brands understand the emerging voice landscape and how they can build voice products.
• A lot of companies that have been using third-party voice apps are slowly transitioning into their own customized voice apps.
• An example is how after the Johnnie Walker Live experience, they also built a portfolio wide recipe experience called Happy Hour, that covers a wide range of Diageo spirits.

Using Voice as a Channel to Get a Message Out

• Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this a lot. He has a flash briefing right now but they have not pushed out an interactive Gary Vaynerchuk skill. They are playing around with the idea, and there should be a live skill out soon.
• They always try to look at how voice can be put out in a way that people want to use it.
• Gary is always giving people advice and answering questions, so it made sense for him to put out a voice experience that would do the same for people.

A Time When Anyone Will Be Able to Create a Skill

• The technology is there to achieve that.
• Patrick’s advice to anyone who wants to try it out, is to first of all do their content planning.
• Doing a synthetic voice is also highly advised. One can record a short sample of their voice while they’re saying something, and then have an AI system that can use that to read back any other text fed to it.
• They have seen examples that are very close to production ready.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Ben!

Ben previously served as Chief Technology Officer of Doable Innovation and Waywire Networks. He comes on to talk about what it’s like to make Alexa skills in Canada, and talk about a really cool Alexa skill that they’ve done with Reebok Canada to to really develop Reebok’s brand in the US and Canada.

Background

• He was the CTO of a lot of startups in New York and even worked in a few ad agencies in a technical capacity.
• He started MagicCo four years ago to be a place where people in advertising and technical people could gather to do cool stuff for brands. They focus solely on voice.

How Voice Became a Part of Canadians’ Lives

• People in the US were doing things in voice in 2017 and by 2018 people were starting businesses around it.
• In Canada, it wasn’t until late 2018 that people started developing an interest in smart speakers.

Projects MagicCo has Worked On

• The company runs different business models. Some of them run omnichannel campaigns for brands with Alexa as a distribution mechanism. Other companies are creating products around Alexa.
• Their clients include Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, Chobani Yoghurt, Elite Coffee, energy and power companies like National Grid, the air force, and others.
• They work in industries like energy, financial services, consumer product goods, and healthcare.
• They develop voice applications for all the major platforms including Samsung Bixby and Google Assistant. They also develop chat bots that are connected to voice assistants.

Breaking into the Canadian Market

• They find Canada to be a very robust market. The growth curve of voice technology adoption in Canada outpaces the US’s in terms of how fast Alexa and Google Home are being adopted.
• There are a lot of regulatory hurdles in some industries and they present diverse challenges especially because the regulations are different in the US and Canada. That affects the deployment of new voice products or campaigns in Canada.

Developing a Skill for Reebok

• Reebok was doing a sneaker drop and hired MagicCo to help with carrying out the whole process through Alexa.
• They worked with Cardi B who was promoting a shoe line with Reebok. Reebok was giving away a few pairs and the give away campaign was all over the media.
• The media campaign directed people to go to a certain Alexa skill so they could sign up to win. They then had to re-open the skill at a certain time to find out if they had won.
• Millions of people signed up and returned to check if they had won, which presented some technical challenges. MagicCo was hired to help sort out those challenges.
• Reebok now has millions of users worldwide who will be notified of their drops through Alexa.

Generating an Email List Through Voice

• They have been doing data collection by offering users the things they want in return for data.
• That helps them get the names and emails of users, which is powerful to have in order to reach back out to clients.

 List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Ben’s Email - Ben@MagicCoLLC.com
• MagicCo’s Website

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Keri!

Teri sat down with Keri at Project Voice 2020 and recorded their conversation. The Inside Voice Podcast features people who are doing all kinds of incredible things throughout the voice industry. The podcast also happens to be main content that is produced by Voice Summit, the biggest voice conference that is put on annually.

Background

• She started out as a dancer and actually has a degree in dance.
• She also worked in health and fitness for a long time and even owned a dance studio, but she realized that she wanted to do more on branding and content marketing strategy. She really loves the branding aspect of it.
• She heard about voice technology from Gary Vaynerchuk about 3 years ago and just fell in love with it. He talked about how we could connect with voice and Keri did some research on that and came across Voice Summit.
• She went to the first Voice Summit and loved it, so she reached out to Pete Erickson and asked how she could help with what they were doing, and Pete mentioned the Inside Voice podcast that they needed help with.
• They have so far done 100+ podcast episodes.

Patterns in the Voice Space

• Most of the people involved in a lot of voice oriented projects are creatives like photographers, writers, dancers, and filmmakers.
• One of the major things she’s hearing about include the need to make voice inclusive with all types of male and female voices, and keeping data secure in the development of voice applications.

Leveraging Voice to Build a Brand

• She believes that voice should be an integral part of a business’ brand and content marketing strategy.
• She encourages businesses to first look at what their customers want and need before they can create voice applications.

Sonic Branding

• She has a personal podcast and her own sonic brand for the podcast.
• She describes it as a sound (not just music) that people should be able to associate with a certain business or brand when they hear it.

Voice Summit 2020

• It will be its third year and will be held from October 5th to 8th 2020 down in Washington D.C.
• The event outgrew it's previous location and they needed more space to hold the number of people who were attending.
• The new space in Washington has more room and access to major airports. There is a lot more voice related activities going on there and it's also where the new Amazon headquarters opened up.
• They are focusing on helping the voice technology community while also enabling them to connect with their potential clients.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Voice Summit Website
• Keri on Linkedin

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Jeferson!

Jeferson was the lead designer on the studio's debut title “The Vortex”, available for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and smartphones. Before Doppio, Jeferson was the VP/GM of mobile at Bandai Namco, studio GM at Electronic Arts and executive producer at BioWare in San Francisco; Studio director at Playfish and creative director at EA Mobile in London; and game development director at Digital Chocolate's Sumea studio in Helsinki.

He has spoken many times at the Game Developers Conference and is an active member of the developer community. He is also one of the founders of IGDA Online Games SIG, and was involved in the publishing of their 2005 Mobile Games Whitepaper.

Background

• He’s been making games for 20 years and currently likes making games for voice platforms.
• He used to make mobile games and moved up in his profession to work with EA Mobile, Playfish, BioWare, and Bandai Namco. Eventually he branched out to start his own company, Doppio.
• He was always excited about interactive stories and voice was a great way to go into that.
• With voice entertainment being fairly new, he sees some creative and business opportunities there, which is how he started Doppio with his co-founder Chris Barnes.
• They released their first game, “The Vortex” on Alexa in 2018 just to see what the market was like.
• They got some investors and used the money to hire a bigger team and set up an office in Portugal.
• They released their second game, “The 3% Challenge” in 2019.

Negative Response From Traditional Gamers

• Traditional gamers look down on voice games because they prefer high quality graphics and other features; which voice doesn’t offer.
• That happens with every new platform, for example, when the first mobile phone came out, they were not meant for gaming but the minute they had a screen, they had the simple snake game. Today, mobile phone games are very advanced.

The Vortex

• When they started out, he learnt that when making games for a new platform, things don’t always work as well as expected.
• They didn’t want to do a “branchy” game so they designed the game to be where someone could say anything. They also wanted it to make sense to their target audience, so they settled on a sci-fi theme where the gamer wakes up from a cryofrozen state in a colonist ship. The person is conscious but their body is frozen, so all they can do is give orders to robots in the ship.

The 3% Challenge

• They wanted to do something different with this game by stretching things farther.
• They made it more of a conversational and social game where a gamer could interact with other people.
• It has both a story mode where a gamer goes through chapters depending on their choices and a branchy mode that is more conversational.
• They kind of developed the game with their audience because they applied a lot of what they learned from the analytics of how people spoke to the game and the words they said.
• They are working on releasing chapter 7 and 8 of the game.

Tips for Game Designers

• Watching and understanding what a platform is good for, and working with that is more advisable.
• An example with voice is how it evolves every few months.
• After watching a platform and figuring out what it’s all about, one can come up with a way to create something fun and interactive.
• He advises game developers not to obsess about copying successful games and focus more on creating something different.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Vocal ID Website
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• The Vortex
• The 3% Challenge
• Doppio Games Website
• Doppio on Twitter
• Doppio on Facebook

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Amanda!

Amanda produces, hosts, shoots, and edits videos for HuffPost Canada, and also hosts, writes, and produces the HuffPost Canada Splash Daily News Flash Briefing for Google Home and Alexa. The flash briefing achieved 20% audience growth in the third quarter of 2019 and is sponsored by VW. Amanda produces and consults on short, long form and docuseries video content for Verizon Media brands, including HuffPost Canada, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Canada Sports, Yahoo! Finance.

She also manages, trains and mentors reporters and production teams to excel under tight deadlines, and innovates and consults on branded content video series with RYOT Studios.

Background

• She’s been with HuffPost (Now Verizon Media) for about 4 years.
• She loves audio/video storytelling and has been doing audio and video for almost a decade.
• When the opportunity came up to host the HuffPost Canada Splash Daily News Flash Briefing, she felt it was an exciting opportunity, and a new and innovative space that everyone should look at.

The Idea for the HuffPost Canada Splash Daily News Flash Briefing

• The flash briefing was created when HuffPost realized how smart speakers were starting to go mainstream. Other competitors were already in the space so they had to take the opportunity to also get in more listeners’ ears.
• They already had successful podcasts like Born and Raised which is all about the stories of second generation Canadians, and the Follow Up Podcast which is a political podcast.

The Splash Daily News Content

• They have a 3-member team that gets the flash briefing out every day.
• A lot of news flash briefings are mostly just repurposed radio or other repurposed content, but Amanda and her team focus more on releasing authentic and fresh content that can help them make a personal connection with listeners.
• She’s always looking at what’s in the news, what’s trending, the great stories that are being covered on the HuffPost site, and selects which stories they want to highlight on any particular day.
• They record it every day in the afternoon and release it every night, 6 days a week.
• They also have a website where they upload all the flash briefings.

Feedback From Listeners and the Team

• They haven’t really engaged with people directly.
• It’s still a new technology with an emerging audience that they’re keeping an eye on.
• Amanda made all her team members buy smart speakers, and they’ve been getting on board. They see it as something innovative they’re doing.

The Quiz

• They operate on both Alexa and Google Home, and they’re looking to go into more interactive response news quizzes in 2020.
• In December 2019, they tried it out with a quick 5 question news quiz with multiple choices. It was a new way to interact with listeners and they’ll be doing more of it in 2020.

Sponsorship for the Flash Briefing

• They had Volkswagen as a sponsor for a campaign and they saw it as so exciting that a company of that magnitude would see the value in advertising through a flash briefing.
• They wanted to advertise a few car models and Amanda and her team integrated call to actions about the models in the flash briefing.
• Volkswagen understood the length of a flash briefing is very short, and so they only sent in a few sentences about the car models that Amanda read personally.

Future Plans

• The idea of adding a skill like a news quiz and other skills, including the branding opportunities that are there, are really exciting to her.
• She feels a flash briefing is an opportunity to give listeners more valuable content that they need.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• HuffPost Canada Splash Daily News Flash Briefing
• Born and Raised Podcast
• The Follow Up Podcast
• The HuffPost Website
• HuffPost Canada on Twitter
• HuffPost Canada on Instagram

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Teri will share the recording of the presentation that he gave at Project Voice 2020 about flash briefings and the top flash briefing tips for 2020 and beyond.

Teri was awarded the Flash Briefing of the Year award at the event, and has recently learned that Amazon named him an Alexa champion. His Crack the Code gamified flash briefing competition also just recently ended and he will be announcing the winners in this episode.

Enjoy!

The Audio Content Production Opportunities with Flash Briefings

• While looking for resources to help him learn about voice technology, he didn’t find much, and so he decided to start his Alexa in Canada podcast all about consumers and how they can use Alexa and leverage voice technology.
• His Voice in Canada flash briefing has been the number one rated flash briefing and new skill in Canada since it started.
• He started the Briefcast.FM Network, which is a network of curated briefcasters who are producing some of the very best flash briefings in the market.
• Combining his passion for voice with his medical expertise, he also created a suite of voice first health flash briefings on top of his Voice First Health Podcast.
• He also created a course called Flash Briefing Formula to help the voice community.
• There are 700,000 podcasts and 12,000 flash briefings, which means that for every 60 podcasts that are currently out there, there is one flash briefing. This highlights the great opportunity in the space.

The Top 9 Flash Briefings Tips

#1 - Be Brief

• Listeners are subscribing to multiple flash briefings (6 to 10 at least), and they want quick content. They want to get in and out, and get the little nuggets so they can move on.
• From a poll that Teri conducted within his audience, the preferred length for a flash briefing episode is 3 minutes or less.

#2 - Solving a Problem

• The best way to develop a nice relationship with listeners through a flash briefing is by solving a problem that the listeners have.

#3 - An Eye Catching Eye

• As of today, the way people are finding flash briefings is by looking at some type of visual display.
• Teri asked his audience how they search for flash briefings, and 68% of them said that they use some type of visual interface like the Alexa app, the Briefcast.FM website, and the Amazon website.

#4 - Equipment

• The use of decent equipment is paramount if someone wants to create a great flash briefing.

#5 - Have Fun with it

• It’s important for one to be willing to experiment and be creative. For example, for the 500th episode of his flash briefing, Teri created the Crack the Code competition to make the flash briefing fun and engaging for his listeners.

#6 - Consistency

• This is probably the most important tip because if one is not consistent, they will definitely lose their listeners.

#7 - Analyze

• One must take time to strategize about their titles and descriptions when they’re creating their flash briefing. Amazon is a search engine just like Google, and so it’s critical to use the right keywords. Daniel Hill from the Instagram Stories Flash Briefing advises people to pick a name for their flash briefing that incorporates something that people are searching for on Amazon or Google.

#8 - Sonic Branding

• Emily Binder of Voice Marketing with Emily Binder flash briefing says that a flash briefing’s consistent intro and outro should be on brand and short (under five to ten seconds each)

#9 - Start Today

• Now is the time to start a flash briefing. They are an incredible opportunity for people to get their message out to their niche (audience)

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• www.AlexainCanada.ca/Funnel
• Teri’s YouTube Channel

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He met so many like-minded people at the event, listened in on some sessions and participated in others. Bradley Metrock and his team did a great job organizing and coordinating the event. Teri had a videographer following him around for the entire duration of the event so he could capture as much content as possible to share with the Alexa in Canada audience. He was awarded the Flash Briefing of the Year award at the event.

Welcome and Enjoy!

Teri made a couple of short clips of his conversations with the people he met at the event, and the include:

Scot Westwater from Pragmatic Digital

• Scot and his wife Susan are the founders of Pragmatic Digital and they just recently released a book that they did the book signing for at the event.
• They also recently released a new program called Voice Masters.
• They are focused on creating strategies for voice. They help businesses figure out what the value for their audience is, figure out what they’re trying to achieve from a business standpoint, and to actually figure out where those two intersect to create something that is useful and usable, instead of just novelty.
• He was excited by Teri’s panel and wanted to attend the event because they hadn’t attended in 2019.
• They will be doing a talk about strategy and the book they just released.

Noa Eshed from Trinity Audio

• She is the CMO of Trinity Audio and attended the event to learn more about the audio and voice industry, while also learning more about the predictions for 2020.
• She predicts that more readers will turn to listeners in 2020.
• She thinks publications will produce their written content in audio form too.
• She also predicts that audio advertising will evolve. This will happen through humanizing brands and telling stories.

Roger Kibbe of Samsung Bixby

• He is a developer and evangelist for Samsung Bixby.
• He is at the Project Voice to attend some sessions and do a talk.
• He will also be giving a workshop for Bixby with his team.
• He is excited to see how big the industry has gotten and how much momentum is around it.
• In 2020, he sees brands getting very serious about voice, and including it in their marketing budgets.

Dr. Neil Desai of MedFlashGo

• He is a family physician and one of the co-founders of MedFlashGo and DentalFlashGo, which are Alexa skills.
• He is the chief marketing officer for both those skills.
• They are focused on evolving medical education in the 21st century and training the next generation of physicians and healthcare professionals to teach, learn, create, and practice medicine in the century we live in by leveraging voice.
• He thinks voice technology will be adopted more in 2020.

Dr. Sirish Kondabolu of Medicine Remixed Podcast

• He is an orthopedic surgeon by training and the co-founder of Medicine Remixed which is a media company focused on podcasting and voice technology.
• On the voice side, he is interested in the implications of voice in both patient education and provider education. He feels that there are so many simple interventions that we can do using voice.
• One use case that he has been fascinated with is patient education specifically in orthopedic surgery with for example, post-op discharge instructions.
• Voice is the only platform where people can do all sorts of things while listening to what they need to listen to.

Amy Stapleton of Tellables

• She is the Founder and CEO of Tellables.
• She will be talking at the event about merging Tellables into a brand new company called Chatables. They will be extending their storytelling experience from the lessons that they learned from their My Box of Chocolates experience and conversational stories. 
• They are building a new platform for authors and are looking into stories as a service where brands can extend their conversations with their customers by engaging with Chatables to find a conversational story that might peak the interest of customers.
• She thinks 2020 will be a transitional year where a lot of changes will take place in voice technologies.

Andy Bellevia of KnowlesCorp

• His company makes small microphones and speakers for mobile phones, voice assistants, smart speakers, other voice enabled IoT devices, hearables and hearing aids.
• He is responsible for all the in-ear products, and that’s what brought him to Project Voice, to get an insight into the intersection of modern hearables, where they’re going, and how hearables will enable voice on the go wherever someone goes.
• There has been a new Bluetooth standard for hearables that will be lower powered so hearables will have longer battery life and now they’ve become very useful to wear all day. Andy watched at CES how Google Assistant is pushing towards voice enabling third party apps.

Katherine Prescott of VoiceBrew

• She is the founder and editor of VoiceBrew, a digital media company dedicated to helping people get the most out of Alexa. They currently have 40,000 subscribers.
• They do a daily “One Actually Awesome Thing to Try with Alexa”
• They also publish comprehensive feature guides on everything from Alexa routines, to drop-in, to important topics like privacy.
• They recently launched an Alexa Tip of the Day flash brIefing largely inspired by Teri and other flash briefing creators.

Daniel Hill 

• He teaches small business owners how to use Instagram.
• He has a flash briefing where he talks about news, new features that have come to Instagram, strategies, tips and tricks, and answers questions on there.
• He spoke at the event about discoverability on voice especially voice skills.

Adrian Simple of Gaming Observer

• He runs an Alexa flash briefing called the Gaming Observer, which is ranked number one in the US and the UK.

Danny Ortiz

• He works with an incubator in Columbus, Ohio called Wave Columbus or the Wave Innovation Center. They incubate companies and help them grow in whatever area.

David Box from Macadamian Technologies

• He and his company presented topics on how to start up a voice skill in a voice bootcamp 101 type of session.
• They are focused on building the future of healthcare, and voice is a large part of that. They look at many different ways where they can incorporate voice into clinical workflows, and into the everyday lives of patients in order to improve outcomes and help clinicians improve their daily lives.

Nate Trelor from Orbita

• He sees a transformation of healthcare taking place in 2020 through the power of voice.
• Voice has already started being used in clinical use cases transforming how patients communicate with their care providers and manage their own wellness.

Carl Robinson of the Voice Tech Podcast

• He saw some amazing presentations at the event.
• He has mostly been doing a range of podcast interviews with interesting people at the event.

Bret Kinsella of VoiceBot.ai

• He was the focus of the Bret Kinsella roast during the award ceremony which was a lot of fun.
• He also won the This Week in Voice Award for the Voice/AI Commentator of the year, and won the Voice/AI journalist of the year.
• They educate the industry and help people make better decisions so they can understand what’s going on today and where the trends are headed.

Ray Kyle of Project Voice

• He’s a huge part of the Project Voice team.
• He handles business development for the event and all the Voice First events they do all over the US.

Bradley Metrock of Project Voice

• He is the CEO of Score Publishing, a new type of publishing company that help creators find voice.
• He is the host of This Week in Voice and Executive producer of Project Voice.

Links and Resources in this Episode

• Voice Masters
• Play Crack the Code Here
• Trinity Audio
• The Gaming Observer Flash Briefing
• www.TheGamingObserver.com
• Adrian Simple on Linkedin
• Adrian Simple on Twitter
• www.TheWaveColumbus.com
• www.Orbita.ai
• www.VoiceTechPodcast.com
• www.VoiceTechPodcast.com/Newsletter
• www.VoiceBot.ai
• www.VoiceBot.ai/Insider

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Audrey!

Audrey is the brain behind sonic branding and is highly skilled in many areas of sonic branding development and implementation. She oversees Audiobrain’s projects from start to finish, coordinating logistics, strategy, experience design, resources, and talent. In addition, Audrey oversees Audiobrain’s ongoing research in areas of psychoacoustics and biomusicology.

Audiobrain has consistently stayed leaders in this field through innovation, research, education, advanced technological skills, and forward-thinking initiatives for some of the world’s largest brands.

She comes on to the show to talk about the importance of sonic branding and how her and her team at Audiobrain have completely recreated the sound of the Alexa in Canada brand. She will also introduce the new sonic branding for Alexa in Canada.

Background

• Audrey has had Audiobrain for 17 years and has been doing sonic branding for 25 years.
• She defines sonic branding as the strategic and creative process that surrounds the development of a unified, authentic, and consistent sonic experience for a brand.
• Audiobrain has done sonic branding for Xbox 360, the Holland America Cruise line onboard experience, IBM, and many more individuals and corporate entities.
• They have also been music supervisors for nine Olympic broadcasts with NBC
• Audiobrain won The Communicator Award for Best Corporate for Virgin Mobile USA and two Emmy Awards for their work on the Beijing Olympics and London Olympics respectively.

Sonic Branding and its Importance

• A lot of people create audio as a one-off sound logo, and what Audiobrain does is the exact opposite, because they first do their research, discovery, strategy, and then try to find out what is unique about a client so they can figure out that client’s unique audio DNA.
• When she’s teaching sonic branding, she asks people to first come up with a sound that represents how they feel they should sound like.
• Most of them never bring in one piece of music because they never wanna leave out some part of a sound/music that makes them special.
• Sonic branding is customized by blending together those unique sounds. Every sound points to something that is the core and essence of a brand or person.

Creating the Alexa in Canada Sonic Branding

• Audrey and her team started out with discovery. They sent Teri some questions and Teri sent them some material and links.
• They then looked at the places that Teri is present so that they could start to gather all of their research. After that, they looked into his personality traits and strongest characteristics.
• They did an assessment and asked Teri where the brand was going, and then combined everything they had to create a sonic brand filter that was unique to Teri. It’s after that that the composers started to work on the sonic branding.
• Audrey’s entire team was involved in every process, as they are with every project they work on.
• They did a competitive analysis to look at other people that were doing podcasts or flash briefings, and found that nobody had strong sonic branding. They wanted to create a complete experience for Alexa in Canada.
• They created the podcast intro, pre-podcast intro, outro, and several other different interstitials.
• They also created the new Voice in Canada flash briefing intro and outro, as well as several other important sounds for Teri.
• The whole process was seamless and wonderful for Teri.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Audiobrain Website
• Audiobrain on Instagram
• AudioBrain on Twitter
• Audiobrain Email - info@AudioBrain.com

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Julie!

She is a go-to EdTech guru and has been doing a lot of work in her school by helping to implement voice technology in a safe and effective manner for her students. Julie has also been speaking in multiple places about the same and comes on to talk about education and using voice technology to help fulfill educational goals.

Taking Advantage of Voice Technology for Education

• She spoke at the first Alexa Conference (now known as Project Voice) in Chattanooga, TN in 2019.
• By sharing some of the blogposts she had written about using Alexa to explain her interest, Bradley Metrock, the event coordinator of the conference, not only invited her to take part in the conference, but also asked her to be a speaker.
• She asked Bradley if an educator could just sit in the back of the room and observe. 
• She had beforehand dabbled with the idea of using voice in the classroom and even tried the concept out a few times, but held back due to privacy concerns.
• When the Echo Dot Kids Edition came out, she approached Bradley Metrock and told him she would like to pilot them in the classroom, and Bradley connected her to Dave Isbitski who helped her get a few of the Echo Dots to place in the classroom.
• They started using the Echo Dots for routines, reminders, and relevant Alexa skills.
• Blueprints were not available for the Echo Dot Kids Edition, so she begged Amazon to create them, and eventually Amazon came through.
• She believes in personalizing education and that formed the basis for their program where they make Alexa study guides for kids to study for tests. Teachers share those Alexa skills for studying with their families so that their families can use them to study at home.
• They also have an international program at their school through which Julie has been working with four international students who are English language learners. She is using Alexa to help them study for other exams, but what she has seen is that when the students answer Alexa, it helps them with their English pronunciation.
• She will be speaking at Project Voice 2020 and the students will be going with her to share their experiences.

Teachers Using the Echo Devices

• Teachers are not only using the devices in the classroom but also assigning students homework to go and use their devices at home.
• One of the advantages of having Alexa in a classroom is that it allows for small group instruction. A teacher can work with four or five kids over in one corner with one Echo device, and other small groups in other corners with their own Echo devices. They call that Station Rotation.

Privacy Issues and Using Multimodal Devices

• They don’t have to only use the Echo Dot Kids' Edition.
• She freely uses other Echo devices because she doesn’t have to be FERPA and COPPA compliant at her school.
• She advises educators to be careful with how they set up their devices, how they use them, and how they store data.
• She has created a lot of infographics on her website that help educators set up their Alexa devices in a way that protects their students.
• For students under the age of 13, she only uses the kids' edition Echo Dot, because the device is COPPA compliant. She uses other Alexa devices in the other grades.
• She has not used Alexa devices with screens because of their price point, but what she loves about using smart speakers in the classroom is their price point. They can put a smart speaker into a classroom for $30 to $50 and every student has access. In a world where there is so much talk about equity of access, this could be a huge way for rural or poorly funded areas to make sure students have access to the world at large.

Classroom Management via Smart Speakers

• She advises that a teacher should start off by telling the students what the expectations are. For example, students can’t just ask Alexa any question they want.
• A smart speaker helps keep the students engaged and listening to the responses that Alexa gives to the educational questions they collectively ask.

Teachers’ Reactions

• Julie asks teachers to pilot the smart speakers and that way teachers get to experience the benefits.
• When she first started out, some teachers were very skeptical about using them, and even now, some teachers don’t use them at all.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• Vocal ID
• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• How to Turn FreeTime on Alexa On or Off
• Julie’s Website
• Julie on Twitter
• Julie on Instagram

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Teri will highlight all that has happened with the Alexa in Canada Podcast and Alexa in Canada Facebook community, and also thank you the listeners for your support.

Enjoy!

The Highlights:

#1: Alexa in Canada Podcast

• Episodes are currently released on a weekly basis, and Teri had the opportunity to interview a lot of great and interesting thought leaders throughout the year.
• You can check out the podcast's top ten most popular episodes at AlexainCanada.ca/106
• Teri also did an episode on the top ten Amazon Alexa skills that are available in Canada.

#2: The Voice in Canada flash briefing

• It has been running consecutively for 681 days, and Teri is so pleased that listeners continue to tune in and send in a lot of great feedback.
• The flash briefing has been the number one rated flash briefing and number one rated new skill in Canada.
• It reached the 100 review milestone on the Amazon Alexa Skill Store, which was a remarkable fete.
• Teri launched a gamified version of the flash briefing and it had tremendous results in terms of the engagement of listeners. It was called Crack the Code, and it involved listening to the flash briefing to get a clue from Teri that one would then embark on trying to solve. They would then go to an Amazon Alexa skill called Crack the Code, open it, talk to Alexa, and try to figure out what the riddle/clue answer was. There was a new clue every day. It went on for two weeks. If one could collect the different pieces of the final code, then one could enter to win a whole host of prizes.
• Crack the Code had a set of sponsors and it was a great success. There were over 500 people who played the game and it got very wonderful feedback.
• On January 15th 2020, Teri will be launching Crack the Code 2020. It’s available at AlexainCanada.ca/CracktheCode

Project Voice

• Teri has been nominated for four awards at the event in January 2020.
• They include Voice AI Commentator of the Year, Flash Briefing of the Year, Healthcare Voice Developer of the Year, and the Healthcare Voice Developer of the Year.
• A lot of that has to do with Teri’s other brand, Voice First Health.

Amazon in Canada

• Amazon continues to lead and innovate in voice technology, and in 2019, they released a whole bunch of different new Echo products like the Echo Show 5, Echo Show 8, Echo Flex, Echo Dot with Clock, and Echo Studio.
• There are a number of Echo products that have been announced in the US that are not yet available in Canada like the Echo Ring, Echo Buds, and Echo Glasses.

Exciting Things Coming Up in 2020

• As of January 1st, there’s a special article that has been picked up by a particular social media outlet all about the Crack the Code game and flash briefings, and how to use that in a voice marketing funnel.
• Teri has some talks lined up and he will be sharing a lot of content from the talks, particularly at Project Voice where he will be giving three talks.

The Alexa in Canada Community

• It has grown immensely to about 1,900 members.
• Members have discussions and answer questions about using Alexa.
• Teri has been looking for ideas on how he can refer to the community, and the door is open for all community members to share their ideas on that.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• The Alexa in Canada Community

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These episodes will be great for anyone who wants to learn more about how they can get started with their Amazon Alexa device. They are based on the podcast episodes that have been downloaded the most and they are all accessible at AlexainCanada.ca.

And the 10th Most Listened Episode is!

#10: 73 - Voice Design with Obeid Ahmed of Botmock

• Obeid is an entrepreneur, mentor, and technologist, and has been involved in a lot of early stage startups.
• He came on the show to talk about Botmock, a platform he created to allow people to publish skills to Alexa and other platforms. Botmock is designed to create conversations between a user and Alexa in a simpler drag and drop editor, so the user doesn’t really need to know code to do it.
• Botmock allows developers to share their prototypes and get feedback all in one centralized location. It’s helping companies and individuals build better voice experiences.
• Obeid has a great use case that he talks about where they used Botmock with the Canadian Blood Services to create some conversational design experiences.
• The episode can be found at AlexainCanada.ca/73

#9: 62 - The 2019 Alexa Conference Roundup

• This was a very popular podcast.
• Teri recorded this episode at the 2019 Alexa Conference. He approached a number of key leaders and influencers in the voice space and asked them for a little bit of a sound bite and then he put them together to produce a kind of mashup.
• It’s available at AlexainCanada.ca/62

#8: 78 - How to Setup Alexa in Canada in 2019

• This was an update on Teri’s original episode on how to set up Alexa.
• It’s available at AlexainCanada.ca/78

#7: 75 - Awesome Aariv Modi: A Grade 5 Alexa Skill Developer

• Teri interviewed a grade 5 voice technology enthusiast and developer, Aariv Modi, who was accompanied by his dad. Aariv is making Alexa skills and creating educational videos. He is all in on Amazon Alexa and is such a bright young man.
• Aariv is going to be speaking at the Project Voice event in January 2020.
• The episode is available at AlexainCanada.ca/75

#6: 66 - The Last Interface with Brian Roemmelle

• Brian Roemmelle is one of those visionaries that don’t come around often.
• He has been termed “The Oracle of Voice” and is the one who came up with the term “Voice First”
• He has often times been described as the “Modern Day Thomas Edison”
• This episode was all about Brian’s ideas about where we are going with voice technology and how he feels that voice is the primary input and output device of the human being.
• The episode is available at AlexainCanada.ca/66

#5: 3 - How Does Alexa Work?

• Teri went through the basic terms of what the difference is between Alexa and an Echo, what a skill is, the different components of an Echo Device, what happens when someone speaks to Alexa, etc.
• The episode is available at AlexainCanada.ca/3

#4: 61 - How to Create an Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing

• This was an episode Teri did about how to create an Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing.
• Teri has a comprehensive course on how to create a flash briefing available at FlashBriefingFormula.com, and it’s absolutely free.

#3: 60 - 2019 Top Ten Amazon Alexa Skills in Canada

• Teri went through the Amazon Skill Store and looked at what the top skills in Canada were at that time.
• He did not include the ambient sound skills in the list because they’re so many.

#2: 65 - Interactive Storytelling with Amy Stapleton of Tellables

• They talked about interactive storytelling in the context of Amy’s company, Tellables, and in particular their Alexa skill called, My Box of Chocolates. It’s a very unique concept that allows users to ask Alexa about boxes of chocolates where the different chocolates in the boxes represent different stories. The different storytellers have different personas.

And Now For the Top Alexa in Canada Podcast Episode for 2019…

#1: 4 - How to Setup Alexa in Canada

• It was the first episode Teri did that was specifically about addressing how to set up Alexa in Canada.
• It was the most listened to podcast episode.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• Crack the Code 2020

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, Dr. Landry!

Dr. Landry has an amazing background as an audiologist and academic, and has applied his skills in not only creating some amazing Alexa skills, but also in creating an incredible resource for people in the voice space under the brand of Voice Market Data.

He combines his expertise with statistics, and allows us to look at the data of the skills we have in the market, find market trends, and identify opportunities in the voice space. He is an Acadian and is very passionate about empowering francophones in minority situations (Acadians being one of them).

Background and Getting into Voice

• He has a PhD in Audiology and was at one point one of the global experts in how sound interacts with other senses to form our perception.
• He worked with a VR startup where they were trying to help people touch virtual objects. 
• His interest in breaking down perception came about from his university professor's support and guidance.
• His first experience with voice technology was when his brother-in-law gave them a Google Home.
• Reading Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crushing It and listening to a related podcast, his interest in voice technology was heightened. He wanted to do something fun in the voice space by creating an interesting skill.
• He used Invocable (Now known as Voiceflow) to create his first skill.
• A year later he got involved with VoiceTech TO, a Toronto-based community of voice technology enthusiasts. He demod his Alexa skill, Poop Detective, at VoiceTech TO, and it became very popular which made him realize the huge opportunity in the space.

Voice Market Data

• His journey to creating this website started when he created an app to share and discover street art. He built it using a tool called App Annie.
• As he was working on his second Alexa skill, he wanted to find out what the popular skills in the Amazon skill store were, so he wouldn't waste his time building a skill that wouldn’t go anywhere or help anyone.
• He discovered that there was no real way for someone to understand what people are doing in the voice space and what the trends are. He knew he could build such a resource, so he did, and that’s how Voice Market Data came about.
• The website provides data on what the most popular skills are generally.
• He will soon be releasing a tool that will enable people to play around with the website by checking out the data on a skill they have an idea for, so they can figure out how to create the best skill. For example, when he was creating Poop Detective, he knew there were several poop related skills, so he knew he needed to create a fairly unique skill.
• There was no way to verify the semantic difference between poop detective and some other similar skill. He therefore wants to build a function where someone can type in their target invocation and see how semantically different it is from what exists.

The Influence of Keywords in Invoking Skills

• He has no idea where keywords play there because they are not present in the marketplace. They are not present in the listings but he believes that they are used in ranking skills based on the search term.

The Accuracy of Data

• The analytical data in the market may not be very accurate which concerns him a lot.

List of resources mentioned in this episode

• The Comprehensive Flash Briefing Formula Course
• Poop Detective
• Voice Market Data
• Dr. Landry on Twitter

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are so many ways that we can use Alexa to make our holidays more fun. Teri will just give us a taste of what we can do and a lot of these are ideas that Amazon came up with. Do you have some more ideas that you can share? Reach out at @DrTeriFisher on Twitter.

Here we go:

1. Alexa, Start the Holiday Party

• This is asking Alexa to set up a routine that automatically triggers all the things that you want to happen when you say the words, “Start the holiday party”
• For example, you can set it up to turn on your favorite holiday music, change the light colors in your home (if you’ve got different colored lights), dim lights, turn some lights off and others on, and so many other things.

2. The Drop-In Feature

• This is useful if you have distant family. It allows you to drop in on those family members that may not be able to visit you. These people could be in the same neighborhood, city, country, or even farther away.
• You simply say, “Alexa, Drop in on [The Person’s Name]”
• You can invite people that you want to be able to contact through the drop in feature. Once you’ve invited them, you just simply say the drop in command.

3. Alexa, Start Game Night

• This is great for playing some holiday trivia when you want to have a little break from whatever is happening in your home at that particular time.
• There are lots of different games that you can play with Alexa by enabling that skill and telling Alexa to start that skill.

4. Alexa, Where is Santa Claus?

• You can ask Alexa this on Christmas day to find out where Santa is.
• If it’s Christmas Eve, you can ask Alexa, “Open Norad tracker”, and she will tell you where Santa is at any particular moment.

5. Alexa, Who is at the Front Door?

• If you have a video display Echo device like an Echo Show, you can say, “Alexa, who is at the front door?”
• So when you get your visitors coming over, you can use this to know who is coming over.

6. Alexa, Add Milk to my Shopping List

• With all the shopping we have to do this holiday, you can use Alexa to help you with that.
• You can say any item that you need to buy so that you don’t forget to buy it.

7. Alexa, Thaw my Turkey

• Alexa can’t thaw a turkey by herself but she can connect you with the Butterball Turkey Talk Line experts. You’ll just say, “Alexa, open Butterball”

8. Alexa, Play Holiday Music

• This will help you to get in the holiday mood. With Amazon Music, Spotify, or any of your favorite music player, there are tons of different songs that you can play that will get you in the holiday mood.
• You can even set up custom playlists and give them names so that when you ask Alexa for your playlist, she will play the specific songs that you want.

9. Alexa, Set a Timer

• This will be great this holiday season for staying on time.
• It will especially be helpful for waking you up on time.

10. Alexa, Where’s my Delivery?

• When you do your shopping on Amazon, this will help you track where your shopping is, and when it’s going to arrive. It will also give you notifications when it arrives.
• If you’ve bought something for someone in your household and you don’t want them to find out what it is, then you can turn off that setting.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• VocalID Website
• Butterball Turkey Talk Line
• Do All Your Amazon Shopping Here

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Being that there are so many great Cyber Monday deals on Echo devices, Teri decided to do this special podcast on all the deals that Amazon is offering. Some of the deals are new specifically for Cyber Monday while others were carried over from Black Friday.

Here are some of the deals you can take advantage of!

The Echo Dot 3rd Generation

• This is the latest Echo Dot and it’s packaged with one of the Amazon smart plugs. This would normally retail for $104.98 and it’s on sale for $39.99. That’s $65 off or 62% off.

The Echo Dot with a Clock

• This is also a good deal. The regular price is $115 and it’s on sale for $54.99. That’s 52% off.

The Fire TV Cube

• This is the Fire TV that allows you to plug the device into your TV and have voice control of your TV through the actual cube device. It normally goes for $150 and it’s on sale for $90.
• This is a perfect and inexpensive way of adding a smart player to your TV but still have Alexa control.

The Fire TV Sticks

• The non-4K version (the regular one) goes for $50 and it’s on sale for 50% off ($25) while the 4K version goes for $70 and it’s on sale for $35.

The Echo Show 5

• It’s normally $100 and it’s on sale for $64.99

The Echo Show 8

• It normally goes for $170 and it’s on sale $90.

The Echo Show (10-Inch Version)

• It’s normally $300 and it’s going for $194.99

The Echo Flex

• This is the device that plugs into the wall and provides Alexa wherever you have an outlet.
• It’s normally $35 and it’s on sale for $24.99

The Echo Dot

• This is the one without the packaged deal. It goes for $70 and it’s currently on offer for $30.

The Echo (Cylinder) and Echo Plus

• The Echo (Cylinder) normally goes for $130 and it’s on sale for $80 while the Echo Plus (with the built-in smart home hub) normally goes for $200 and it’s on sale for $135.

Here are some of amazing package deals!

The Echo Show 5 with the Wyze Cam (Version 2)

• This would normally go for $145 and it’s on sale for 41% off at $84.99.

The Echo Dot with a Ring Video Doorbell

• This is normally $195 but it’s going for 36% off at $124.99.
• This Ring Video Doorbell is the older version of the Ring Doorbell. It doesn’t have the quick release rechargeable battery pack, motion detection, and some other features that the newer versions have.

The Echo Show with a Ring Video Doorbell 2

• This is normally $349 and it’s on sale for 44% off at $194.
• The Ring Video Doorbell 2 has a higher resolution, interchangeable face plates, quick release rechargeable battery pack, and many other great features.

The Echo Show 5 and Ring Doorbell Pro

• This would normally go for $349 but it’s on sale for 24% off at $264.
• The Ring Doorbell Pro is a huge upgrade from the first video doorbells.

The Echo Show 5 with the Ring Video Doorbell Pro

• This is normally sold for $399 and it’s now going for 39% off at $245.
• The Ring Video Doorbell Pro here is an upgrade from the rest but it doesn’t have the quick release rechargeable battery pack because it’s hardwired to the user’s home.
• It also has advanced motion detection.

The Echo Dot with the Blink XT2 (3 Camera Kit)

• This normally retails for $400 and it’s on sale for $249.99.
• The Blink XT2 cameras are two-way audio with 2-year battery life. They are weather-proof and great for setting up cameras around the home.

The Echo Dot with a Smart Light Switch

• This is the Echo Dot with a TP Link Smart Light Switch. These switches are excellent.
• This package is normally $105 but it’s now on sale for $45.

The Echo Dot and Ring Floodlight Camera

• This is basically lights for outside your home with a camera with an Echo Dot. It usually for $399 and it’s on sale for $259.

The Echo Dot with a Ring Alarm (5-Piece Kit)

• This normally sells for $269 and it’s on sale for $189.
• This is a great way of setting up a home security system. The Ring Alarm 5-piece kit includes a base station, contact sensor, motion detector, keypad, and range extender.

The Echo Dot and the All-New Ring Stick Up Camera

• This is a relatively inexpensive way to add a camera. The bundle retails for $200. It’s on sales for $129.99.
• It can be bought as a plugin and there is also a solar-powered one. 

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

• Flash Briefing Formula
• Trinity Audio
• Get Amazon’s Amazing Cyber Monday Deals Here

Other useful resources:

• Voice in Canada: The Flash Briefing
• Complete List of Alexa Commands
• Alexa-Enabled and Controlled Devices in Canada
• Teri Fisher on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada on Twitter
• Alexa in Canada Facebook Page
• Alexa in Canada Community Group on Facebook
• Alexa in Canada on Instagram
• Please leave a review on iTunes
• Shopping on Amazon.ca

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trinity Audio is a content technology platform that allows publishers and content creators to enter the audio era by transforming their text content into audio, providing a new way to engage, grow, and monetize audiences.

Welcome, Ron!

Ron is a huge believer in voice technology, and shares his passion and thoughts about turning readers into listeners through Trinity Audio’s blog post, where he keeps in touch on a weekly basis. He’s also the CEO of TIM Media (formerly Meme Video), a leader in the field of video and display advertising that provides video distribution and management technologies to publishers and advertisers. He is currently based in Israel.

He comes on to talk about Trinity Audio’s brilliant technology and how they're going to be tackling the process of making it easy for publishers to put out their content through Alexa skills.

Trinity Audio

• They enable publishers to turn their content and website text into audio.
• They also enable publishers to generate different revenue streams based on the audio. This will be very supportive to most publishers who are struggling with revenue generation.
• The combination of audio and voice offers great user experience and engagement.
• Eventually, there will be listings of articles that people can listen to instead of reading, and this will create a reliable revenue stream for publishers.
• Trinity Audio is also focusing on ensuring that all the audiofied content from different publishers will be available via voice through Alexa skills.
• Their products include the Trinity Player and Trinity Pulse.
• The Trinity Player instantly converts a user’s articles into audio that their readers can listen to on any device, anywhere they are. One can place the player wherever they want on any page to seamlessly integrate with their existing website experience. With a few clicks, the user can also customize it to natively align with their overall site’s look and feel.
• The Trinity Pulse is a content discovery unit that highlights a user’s top trending audio articles as well as podcasts and radio shows across the web and gives readers audio content recommendations that improve their overall experience. Readers/Listeners spend more time on site, exploring more content to enjoy while browsing. This is a direct impact on revenue growth.