About 37%, or in numbers, 95 million U.S. adults have smart speakers in their homes. Half of them are daily active users. However, in the last two years, user growth has only been at 4%. (Smart Speaker Consumer Adoption Report Mach 2022) About 70% of surveyed businesses stated that voice-enabled digital assistant technology is critical […]
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Conversational Interaction Conference 2022
I did something last week I hadn’t done for quite some time: I spoke at a conference in front of a live audience. I started speaking at conferences in 2002 after I had created the SwiXml open source project: Graphical User Interfaces were described in XML documents, parsed at runtime, and rendered into Java objects – Android […]
Frictionless Speed / Zero Intent Skills
Teams had taken four runs down the 1,450 meter (almost 1 mile) long track, made of reinforced concrete, covered in ice. Still, their combined times were separated by less than a blink of an eye. The ice on the track varied, the colder and harder, the faster the sleds would go. A sled’s metal blades […]
Alicia vs Alexa
Democratizing the creation of delightful audible content Have you ever heard an interview with Alicia Keys? She spent most of her childhood in Hell’s Kitchen, one of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods. Experiencing how much emotion she’s putting into each word and her very deliberate expressive pronunciation means you cannot just casually listen but have to […]
A Universal Voice Browser
On September 25, Amazon released 80 new devices, some of which can be found here. Even for a company of its size, that is an impressive number and an even more impressive line-up. However, I think something much more profound happened a day earlier. On Tuesday, September 24, 2019, at 11:04 AM EDT, in a […]
How to get conversational UI right
Cross-Post from my article on VentureBeat.com With the rise of AI, voice, and more generally language-driven technologies — like chatbots, Siri, and Amazon Echo — conversational user interfaces (CUI) have a chance of becoming the next major technology platform after mobile. The field of conversational UI holds a lot of promise in terms of how […]
SpeechTEK 2017, Washington, District Of Columbia
— The Einstein Memorial – National Academy of Sciences, 2101 Constitution Ave NW, Washington, DC 20418 “New uses of speech technologies are changing the way people interact with companies, devices, and each other. Speech frees users from keyboards and tiny screens and enables valuable, effective interactions in a variety of contexts.” Clearly focused, SpeechTek 2017 was intended […]
The Path to the CUI is Heavily Mined and Booby-Trapped
Cross-Post from my article in Chatbots Magazine The concept of the Conversational User Interface (CUI) is not really new. Wolfgang Wahlster of the German Research Center for AI, DFKI, wrote 12 years ago in his paper on Conversational User Interfaces: “Conversational user interfaces allow various natural communication modes like speech, gestures and facial expressions for […]
Conversational Interaction Conference
The CI-Conference is the successor of the Mobile Voice Conference, and like its predecessor, organized by Bill Meisel and AVIOS (Applied Voice Input Output Society). The two day conference (1/30-31) ran like clockwork at the Westin in San Jose, had a keynote, two keynote panels, and 26 sessions. What makes this conference unique, is how it balances academia and […]
Debugging your Alexa Skill
Hosting a skill for the Amazon Alexa platform can be more or less involved, depending on the implementation language and hosting platform you pick. If you have some experience with the Java-Servlet life-cycle, then implementing a skill in Java, using Amazon’s Alexa-Skills-Kit library for Java, available in this Maven Repository and on Github, becomes an […]
Hosting an Alexa Skill yourself
If experimenting with the Amazon Echo / Alexa Skill Kit or running a so-called Skill in production, you generally have two choices: AWS Lambda functions on AWS Lambda (a service offering by Amazon Web Services) Hosting the Web service yourself. If you decide against AWS Lambda, you can build the Web service, using Java Node anything […]