VOICE 2021 - Retro-"speak"-tive

VOICE 2021 wrapped up this week, featuring the voice industry's top talent, who shared their experience and insights on a host of voice-related topics.

But this year's VOICE summit was remarkable for a few reasons:

Advancing the Customer Experience (CX)

The customer experience really is the next frontier in voice tech, and VOICE 2021 drove that home what it means for AI-powered voice tech.

This year's event left nobody out by spanning industries from entertainment to health care, banking to customer service, and more. But, irrespective of specific industries, providing rich voice experiences to your customers creates a more emotional and meaningful connection to your brand. And that, in turn, enables your business to grow while reducing its costs. The focus on CX is one of those rare instances where everybody wins.

The speakers we featured this year were among the best we've ever had, and their eagerness to share their knowledge and experience made the event unforgettable. Whether remote or in-person, this was a rich and immersive experience for all of the attendees - and everybody won.

Unveiling What’s Next in AI Technology 

VOICE Summit also featured some very impressive in-person tech demos from some of the most prominent names in voice tech. Here's a sample of some of the live demos we got to see.

Speechly's VOICE UI Platform - How to Configure and Integrate a Voice UI on the Web

Speechly's Hannes Heikinheimo provided a step-by-step demo on how to use Speechly's API to achieve two things:

• Configure a Voice UI Model to a specific domain
• Integrate a Voice UI to an existing website/mobile application

Speechly's Voice UI platform easy to use and is truly real-time. Heikenheimo demonstrated the benefits of creating voice-enabled experiences in which the AI engine can understand users' natural language as soon as they start speaking - the audience was captivated.

Staying Ahead in Voice Through Data, Insight, and Knowledge with VoiceLab.com

Rob Stanbridge of VoiceLab, demonstrated the company's performance and analytics platform, which provides real-time access to voice application analytics and critical voice market data. With VoiceLab, voice professionals can stop wasting valuable time and resources curating and analyzing voice app data manually.

VoiceLab provides everything you need to track, compare, personalize, and optimize the development and promotion of Alexa Skills and Google Actions experiences within a single platform.

Stanbridge's engaging demo guided the audience through some of VoiceLab.com's typical workflows to show how it can help anyone gain better business insights from their voice applications.

The Universal Remote to All Voice Assistants

Chandler Murch of TalkGo provided an overview demo of its game-changing mobile accessory, TalkSocket. TalkSocket attaches to your phone for a seamless hands-free experience using your preferred voice assistant - Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant - even when the phone is locked.

While Amazon and Google support voice-commands in their voice assistant apps, your phone still needs to be unlocked with the app in the foreground to use it. There are roughly 150M smart speakers in the US, of which more than 80% are using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. But only 17% of Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant owners use the voice assistant on their phone because it doesn't provide the same hands-free experience.

Murch gave us a fun and fascinating demo of TalkSockets's capabilities. It was pretty poignant to witness all of the complex commands he successfully used to achieve some impressive results - all without using his hands. Very cool stuff.

Hybrid Event - In-person and Virtual

VOICE 2021 marked the return of in-person events. And after a two-year hiatus, it felt great to get together and renew our sense of community. There were, of course, measures in place to ensure the safety of all present (social distancing, masking, and proof of vaccination). And, the event was also live-streamed for all those who couldn't be in person.

It's almost hard to describe how good it felt to mingle with colleagues, spark up spontaneous conversations and do some old-fashioned networking within the voice community. While we're all grateful for the possibility to attend remotely, there's just nothing like the real thing.

Looking for more conversational AI? Save the date for VOICE 2022: October 10-13, 2022 in Arlington, Va. In the meantime, catch VOICE 2021 on demand, then sign up to receive updates about next year. Be sure to also watch the award-winning VOICE Talks show, Thursday, December 16 at 2 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST.