Hearing Voices, issue #12

or, Google voice + chatbot + amazon polly + oculus lip sync + morph3d avatar = awesome VR bot

This is an excerpt from my weekly email newsletter on voice interfaces, HearingVoices. Join leaders in the industry from voice-focused startups, VC funds, and agencies interested in voice by subscribing at hearingvoices.xyz

Great Reads (and listens)

• Velveteen Rabbits: What a Children’s Story Can Teach Us About Computers that Talk: A blog post by @tripodell, leader of one of the teams responsible for designing the Alexa user experience. Thanks to @ClementDelangue for pointing me to this one.
• Get Up To Speed Learn Faster With High-Velocity Tech: This article talks about the value of speed-watching videos, particularly those that are tutorials. There is similar value in speed listening to podcasts, and with several of the new voice apps, speed listening to articles you may have otherwise had to read (with your eyes).
• Why voice will be the dominant chatbot interface (Inside Intercom): Text-based chatbots offered little reward for a lot of effort. Voice is the key to making bots useful — and the technology to do so already exists.
• Embedded.fm Podcast 178 “Alexa Stop”: Here’s a podcast where Chris Maury from Conversant labs discusses using speech recognition to interact with devices. They note to turn off your Echo and Dots as he invokes Alexa a lot.

Newz

• Get Support from the Alexa Team at Betaworks’ Voicecamp (Amazon Developer Blogs): Amazon has announced it’s involvement with betaworks’ voicecamp.

A product & A hack

• Play.ht | Listen to the web knowledge one article at a time: Play.ht is a browser extension and website where the most popular blogs are read by speech synthesis. Play.ht gives you a decent amount of control over picking which voice you want to listen to, the speed, However you can create playlists, which means you could set up a longer playlist, and if those work on mobile, that’s a useful way to discovery content. As long as you don’t mind listening to the speech synthesis voice.
• Lee Vermeulen on Twitter: “testing a chatbot Modbox NPC… google voice api > chatbot api > amazon polly api > oculus lip sync > morph3d avatar https://t.co/nGHtEvQFyC": This is pretty awesome. Lee Vertesting tweeted out a short video of a chatbot using google voice API, a chatbot API, amazon Polly, Oculus Lip Sync, and morph3d avatar. This starts to illustrate the intersection of VR/Augmented reality and conversational interfaces. Thanks @peterrojas

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Matt

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