YouSaid · the spoken record

Bradley Horowitz

lines on the record: 77
first: 2018-12-24
most recent: 2018-12-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, particularly for radio, I think it's important because there's a lot of data which shows that radios have left U.S. households over the last 15 years. In fact, the ownership is pretty low among millennials in particular, and we expect that trend to continue. But what happened with smart speakers is they brought radio right back into the home. And so that was a great solution for radio because they weren't present. And all of a sudden, it was just like you could call up your favorite radio station just by saying it in the morning.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. There's some good data from Edison Research, which talks about that. It has the people who own smart speakers report that they are listening to more music after they purchase a device. And they're listening to more radio as well.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the number right now is around 80% of the people who have a smart speaker say they're listening to some sort of music or talk radio on a monthly basis. That drops a little bit when you go down to weekly or daily, but it's a significant portion. Almost everybody who buys these tries to listen to music and then they do listen to music.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were talking before about you said that music and streaming music is sort of the killer app for voice assistance. How many people or what share of Americans are listening to music on their smart speakers”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so you think about it, right? So to set it up, and maybe you had a Sono system, and so you could go into your phone and you could start things, you could search. And that's great. People who didn't have that had to make sure it connected to the device properly all the time and all these things. Now you just say, Alexa, play renegades by ex-ambassadors. And she does.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, people always say, well, voice will take off when there's a killer app for it. Well, actually, smart speakers have been adopted en masse because they're great for listening to music or other type, you know, talk radio, other things, podcasts, maybe recode decode.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's working? Well, a few things are working for sure. Utilities are working. So any type of utilitarian interaction, information, I want the weather, conversion or timers, those types of things. Those are far and away the things that users say they're using most frequently. And the other thing that's really working is media. So media is the killer app of smart speakers. And it's not surprising they're speakers, right?”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's actually that's going to be closer to like 24% of U.S. adults, so about 250 million in the US. So, when we look at that device ownership, that's grown significantly. In fact, that's more than 10%. It's about since even the beginning of the year. So that's been growing at a tremendous rate. And I think what we're going to see in this holiday season is we're going to see more smart speakers purchase for sure. That's something that it's no longer a novelty. There are people who are just buying them, adding to their home. A little over half of the people only have one now. And so there's a lot of those people who are going to buy more. But we're also starting to see voice be a bigger driver for other types of devices, whether they be headphones or appliances. And we're going to see a lot more of that this holiday season. And these include these multimodal devices, interactive displays that are designed to work with voice, but also complement it with visual.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want you to give us an overview of where we are right now with voice. We're about to have a holiday season where all sorts of people are going to pick up smart speakers. What percentage of the United States owns a smart speaker right now?”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Data is terrible in an audio environment. And so that's a perfect example. In particular, it's a perfect example because actually getting data often requires a complex input. And voice is actually much better at complex inputs than text.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't agree. What I think about is what's best for the user. And so it's not like the visual interfaces that we had didn't have audio. So a lot of the visual interfaces allowed us to do other things. They have text and they have audio as well because I was a richer experience. They didn't have the capabilities to use voice as an input mechanism in that case until recently. And so what I tell people is don't think voice only. Sometimes it's okay to think of voice first, but it's not necessarily voice only. Some use cases will be voice only because you're driving, for example, and you don't want people looking at a screen. But many other use cases, particularly with complex outputs, you deal with data every day, right? Right. So data is not...”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It makes me think about all of these are adding screens now, which, in my opinion, that makes it seem like there's a deficit in voice. There's something that isn't enough for voice alone to take care of. That's why they sort of need to add screens to these, or at least for certain platforms. Do you agree?”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's also true. Do you want to sometimes you want to get away from it? But the video chat is a really good solution there. I think the folks in Cupertino are sort of yawn at this. They're like, oh, we've had FaceTime forever. Why is this better? It is actually better if you've used these type of devices. So the Echo Show is really an excellent video chat device. I can tell you from experience with people that I've given those to that it's really nice. And so Facebook has this challenge in dealing with voice. Most of their content is visual. That's how they interact. And so how do they actually bring their assets to a space that's mostly voice? And video chat's probably a good point of entry for them.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I guess a couple things. So, first of all, I would say the broader context is, I just wrote something recently which talked about the idea of phase one of the modern era of voices over. And this goes back to what Jeff Bezos said at a recode conference two years ago. He said, you know, we're at the first batter in the first inning when he was being interviewed by Walt Mosberg. And at the time, that was basically true, but we're not there anymore. This market has matured significantly. There's a lot of players. And what we're seeing is the second round of players are coming in, the second wave of devices are coming in, the second round of features. And Facebook fits into that. I think it's an interesting solution that they got that they put out to market.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But still really amazing. And once they re-architected the platform, worked pretty well in most of those use cases. And so that's interesting, but if you look at a commercial around the Syria launch, it's about what Siri can do today. So, they didn't really expand it significantly. There's a lot of reasons for that. But Amazon, again, blew everybody's mind with the introduction of the echo. And so I see those as the two points of this modern era. So first, we had the phone and then we have the echo. And now that was obviously filed a couple years later by Google Assistant. And now we just have this looks like vertical adoption of voice and we have tremendous advances.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then to move forward to what I would call the modern era, that's sort of the pre-modern era. And Dragon was probably the pinnacle of achievement in that pre-modern era. And then we had the introduction of Syria in 2011. And that blew people's minds.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was great. Well, in fact, I had a shoe phone. I think about this mobile phone later on, but it's a whole different story. We moved up, and I think the next big era really was around the late 90s and early 2000s. People will recognize the term dragon, dragon dictation system. Yeah. And so that was the first one that was really good. And that actually had some natural language understanding in it. I've spent some time with some of the people who developed that. Really tremendous technology. So that was what people thought it was. It was really mostly dictation as opposed to control and interaction.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Textual stranglehold that they had. And that's been fine. But now what we're seeing is because of some of these breakthroughs, and I'll walk through just a couple of them, for the first time computers understand us in the language we normally communicate as opposed to us modifying our behavior so that the computers can understand us. So in the 1950s, Bell Labs has, I think it was Audrey, was the first one that is the best known. I think IBM had a much more significant breakthrough in the 60s where it could understand 16 words. I think it was called the Schoebox. And we walked through all the conversations.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, well, if you think about voice technology, it started long before technology as we know it. So I just gave a talk in Chicago, and what we talked about was what's called the Gutenberg parenthesis. And so if you think about it, for millennia, all we really had was the altar tradition. We spoke. In 1440, in Mainz Germany, Johanna Scutenberg introduced the printing press, and all of a sudden you could deploy text at scale. And it really became the default for learning, for information sharing. The economics changed tremendously. And so we had all this text out there floating around, and oral communication moved to the background. And so what happened was we saw is we moved into technology, text was a dominant paradigm, and it was something that was a lot easier for the engineers to make a machine understand. And so we had this whole idea of what, you know, I talk about the”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We publish 50 to 70 times a month now So, yeah, we go really deep. And it's like a resource. And if you think about it, we do news, but as much as anything, we are a chronicle of what's going on in the industry. And so a lot of the things we'll write just so you can go to our search bar, which is much better than Google if you want to learn about this space, because Google biases towards all sorts of things that make it hard for you to find what you really want sometimes. And so we try to cover the things that we think are really important. In 2016, we could cover everything because there wasn't that much. Today it's different.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There weren't really a lot of people covering it. People were just covering surface level. I knew at a depth because we'd worked from a technical level as well as I have this background in businesses and how they adopt technology. And so I said, oh, okay, well, just as a service to these people are asking me, I'll just throw it up on a website.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On behalf of big brands, some really large ones as well. And a lot of media companies as well. But before we even got into that, because I'd done that research, I was talking to people at Advertising Week, and they said, oh, this is a good topic. I'd love for you to write a story for us. I said, okay, I'll write something up. And that was really popular. It got picked up and republished by Huffington Post, and I had all these people asking me. I say, where'd you get this information? I said, well, it was kind of a pain in the neck.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As good as that format is, it was like five times better when you could just respond by voice in order to execute the call to action. So I learned a lot in that in terms of how voice works. We implemented our own voice models and those types of things. And they were a client of mine and enjoyed doing that work. Around 2014, the echo came out and it was a novelty. 2015, Amazon approached that company and said, hey, we'd really like you to support the echo because you understand this space and we're looking for people who understand the space. And we talked about it as a team. And I have a background in strategy consulting and have done a lot of startup positioning. And so I said, okay, well, let's just research it. Let's see what it's like. And we did, and ultimately it led to the company really focusing on that. In fact, it's basically all their business now. They've got over a thousand Alexa skills and Google Assistant Apps published.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you think about the advertisements weren't very effective in some instances because the call to action is incongruous with the way you're actually engaging with the media. So they would say click to convert or open the video or something and it's in your pocket or your purse and it's behind the lock screen and all these other things.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was 2013. And so this was pre smart speaker era. The focus was on mobile ads. And it was really about being able to deliver this interactivity by voice on mobile devices when you're listening to streaming music.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've done a number of different things in technology. I started working in tech in 1996, 7, depending on how you count, and worked with big consulting companies, learned business strategy, learned technology deployment, companies like Accenture and Sapient, worked with a bunch of startups over time. And eventually a series of events that happened, I wound up starting a small agency, and I really focused on post-A round funded startups. Those companies that are trying to go from 200,000 in revenue to 10 million. So they've got some traction, but they really need to grow. So I was doing that, and that led me to start working with a company called Zap Media, two of the co-founders I had worked with previously. They asked me to come in. They're an engineering-led company, and they really needed to establish themselves. And that was a voice-based solution, what they had is interactive audio ads.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hi, I'm Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode. You may know me as someone who worries Alexa and Siri are secretly talking to one another, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode from the Box Media Podcast Network. Today I'm passing the show over to Recode's data editor, Ronnie Mola. She recently interviewed Brett Kinsala, the editor of voicebot.ai about the future of virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Home. Let's take a listen. Thanks Kara. I'm here with Bret Kinsella, the editor of VoiceBot.ai, a publication that has to do with all things voice technology. I've recently been working on a project about voice because it is the future. It's how we're going to interact with machines before the machines take over. Rhett, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2018-12-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: What's next for Amazon's Alexa? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT