Happy New year and welcome to the Alexa Conference

Mari talks from the Alexa Conference just ahead of presenting at the panel of Podcasting in the age of Alexa at The Alexa Conference,

The Alexa Conference

Or call Santa from Google Assistant

A new set of family experiences was announced by Google in their Canadian blog yesterday. Which are they, why it matters at the heart of this episode.

Your Google Assistant can connect families to the North Pole

Varying Speaking Styles with Neural Text-to-Speech

Amazon announced yesterday their advancements on <a href="https://developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/7ab9665a-0536-4be2-aaad-18281ec59af8/varying-speaking-styles-with-neural-text-to-speech" target="_blank">Varying Speaking Styles with Neural Text-to-Speech</a>. In this episode I talk about synthesized speech before this, why it matters, and what the (not that far) future might look like. This is one of the topics on voice technology I'm most passionated about.

Advancements in speaking styles in TTS

Conversational interfaces in institutional services

In this episode, I talk about the automated virtual assistant and chatbot that the Montgomery County Clerk of Courts Office developed to answer many of the most frequently asked questions received by the Montgomery County Clerk of Courts Office by email and phone. Details on the announcement and of Microsoft cognitive services.

A court with a voice: Montgomery County conversational services

Aider - The AI for small business

In this episode we have a guest for the first time in the show. Enjoy my conversation with Brendan Roberts about the challenges of selling an AI product to small business and how Aider can help boost your productivity.

It’s time small businesses had big business capability. 

Shop for Alexa activated smart glasses 

North, a Canadian company introduced their brick and mortar store of smart glasses with Alexa built-in. This is the episode you need to know everything about the announcement.

Alexa voice activated smart glasses available 

Survata surveyed 2000 US smart speakers owners and here is the data

How receptive are smart speaker owners to advertising?

Wait, there is more to say about the new Bixby

I was at SDC yesterday and saw more of Bixby, here are my takes.

More on Bixby and SDC18

Samsung announce yesterday at the Developer Conference in San Francisco that the Bixby platform was open to developers. The Bixby developer Studio was until so far in private beta. We were part of the beta program and created two capsules. Here are the details of the announcement and our capsules!