“In the last five years we’ve focused on partnering with large organizations who have a voice roadmap to give them a custom, branded voice experience. We recommend a branded voice experience so that when people interact with your products, they’re not interacting with Alexa to get to your product, instead they can interact directly with your product through voice.”

Mike Zagorsek, VP Product Marketing, SoundHound Inc.

“They wanted an accessible way for people to place a poppy at the war memorial, even though they couldn’t get out of the house (due to severe lockdown rules). They included some amazing historical stories from the archives and the option to play the beautiful call that’s traditionally played on Anzac Day, “The Last Post.” It resulted in thousands of people being able to commemorate differently, but still in a really meaningful way with a poppy placed at the end of it.”

Paige Harkness, Head of Partnerships and Integration, Alkira

“When it comes to a new technical channel like voice, regardless of size, a lot of businesses are starting from the same point. It’s almost like the days when businesses were building websites back in the 90’s. How do I get started? What are the tools I can use? How can I do this more effectively. We’ve found the same things happening within voice. But as they become more familiar with the channel, they start to build out more immersive experiences and they realize they can use voice as a storytelling tool.”

Nick Laidlaw, Co-Founder and CTO, Voicify

“There are two major differences between Alexa and ATHENA. Number one is that ATHENA understands the supply chain space very well. ATHENA knows the critical metrics that are important for you to measure, and that’s where the subject matter expertise comes in. It’s not a piece of software that you download and have ordinary people do all the reporting. You are hiring an employee who is conversing with you. That is the critical difference.”

Ganesh Gandhieswaran, CEO & Co-Founder, Conversight.ai

“We work with senior living and homecare businesses. Our software creates a way for the senior to engage with whomever is in their circle of trust, whoever their caregivers are. When someone is aging, the more technology grows around them, the more isolated they become. We started to see that we could overcome some of the barriers for patients and particularly with aging patients by helping them better engage with people using a smart speaker.”

Matt Smith, CEO, Speak2

“Voice can really delight customers, but also can transform the operations of a business and that’s something we’re really excited about. Not just on the consumer side, but on the employee facing or enterprise side. We’re on a mission to make technology invisible through voice and to get in better harmony with technology through voice as a healthier medium.”

Eric Turkington, VP of Strategic Partnerships, RAIN

“Voice technology brings a level of comfort to the user and to their loved ones and in the end that’s the most important piece of the puzzle. At the end of the day, you’re always focused on the end user. You may sell it through a business or an employer, but they’re not going to buy it if their employees or their members aren’t happy with it or aren’t getting their needs filled from it.”

Dan Messina, Co-founder, Handsfree Health

“Data is always going to win over opinions and it’s not necessarily going to be used to prove a point or make things take longer than they should due to analysis. We use data to say, ‘this is more powerful than your opinion on what the design should be. You don’t have to take forever to make a decision, look at the data and move to the next thing.’ That makes projects take less time and cost a lot less money.”

Paul Hickey, CEO and Founder, Data Driven Design

“Our vision was to break away from the silos of engineering and development and allow anyone regardless of their technological expertise to launch a voice experience. We make it super easy for businesses to use Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant to create deep and meaningful relationships with their customers. Today, with the pandemic and social distancing and  lockdowns and the craziness, the opportunity for using these voice assistants to build and engage with consumers is actually pretty incredible.”

Jose Cotto, CEO and Co-founder, True Reply

“One thing that text-to-speech does, in general, is to make efficiency and accessibility into user experiences. As the business world continues to digitally transform and strive to create more personal interactions…what falls by the wayside in this move is that consumers miss out on that human interaction. Brands and businesses have moved to voice as a solution to bring back that human element.”

Nate Murray, Marketing Director of N. America, ReadSpeaker AI

“Just the way that a brand has colors, typeface, logos, and patterns, they also could have an auditory brand that has the same consistency, the same rules, and the same idea of tying the brand together at every single touchpoint—having a consistent thread that runs through auditorily just the way you do visually these days,”

Colleen Fahey, US Managing Director, Sixième Son

“What does voice do differently in association with and extend upon websites, chatbots, and other channels? Not just regurgitate the same information or give you the same thing you can get through other channels, but actually allow it to do something that means that a user who interacts with you that way is gaining some form of additional value rather than just being able to get it through the website. Just using markup schema to read out content on the website is not actually developing a voice environment. That’s just taking something and making it audible, but it’s not making it assistive.”

Matt Ware, Head of Operations, FIRST