What makes a good podcast? How about a great podcast? In this episode, Emily and Steve discuss the best ways to create a valuable message to grow your podcast audience as well as how companies should be approaching podcasting as a new form of content marketing. They also discuss emerging opportunities with audio content and voice assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.
Amazon is charging users 99 cents to skin the standard parts of its voice experience with a celebrity voice. As we close out this decade, we can see a parallel between these early voice experiences and the beginning years of one of the most successful social media apps of all time: Instagram.
Filters—whether photo filters or voice skins—begin as a bolt-on and a novelty. But imagine where they’re headed.
Think rich, contextual voice experiences.
Similar to what Google Assistant has done, Amazon is now giving customers the option to hear some familiar voices in addition to Alexa’s default voice. Today the company kicked off its celebrity voice program, and it’s starting with Samuel L. Jackson. - The Verge
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Voice Marketing with Emily Binder
Finalist for Flash Briefing of the Year Award
Whether should brands create their own mini voice assistants like Beeb - which kind of brands should consider this? Katherine explains
The newly announced Interoperability Initiative will strive to ensure that voice activated devices will work with multiple digital assistants like Alexa and Siri at the same time.
The two camps regarding what the voice-first future holds:
A) People will mainly interact with just one assistant (see Adam Cheyer, co-founder of Siri Inc.)
B) We will all use multiple voice assistants
C) A middle ground of master and mini assistants - Dave explains how Alexa could launch Beeb (BBC's assistant) or Spot (Spotify's assistant) - and Beeb would be the master of that smaller domain / use case, making a better overall experience
Alexa eventually functioning as an App Store - but for voice
Plus, how devices like Echo Buds and Echo Frames fit in to a world of mini voice assistants
What is the potential of Echo Buds to allow us to access web content we have never thought of as audio enabled?
Echo Frames could be quite powerful to usher us into a world where the input is pure voice but the output/response is multimodal (visual and audio) - Katherine makes a great point here
Dave Kemp, Business Development Manager at Oaktree Products, Inc.
Katherine Prescott, Founder & Editor at VoiceBrew
We spend major ad dollars on the duopoly (Google and Facebook) with Amazon a distant third. Those ad dollars will shift.
Telenav announced that it is integrating Amazon Alexa into its automotive navigation system offering.
The voice assistant we know today will be so much smarter tomorrow.
The voice assistant will be every person’s personal assistant, their shadow, their life historian and documentarian. It will mitigate our drudge work for life admin tasks like errands and comparison shopping. It will save us all kinds of time. I hope we use that time well.
We are at the mercy of an algorithm today: many ecommerce retailers live and die by SEO on Google and on Amazon. Tomorrow our brands will be at the AI's mercy. The data will be richer, the algorithm more complex.
Amazon, which is nearing $800 billion in value, is making a noticeable push in advertising products, hoping to grab a piece of Google and Facebook’s duopoly of digital advertising. Voice commerce is estimated to be a $18.3 billion opportunity by 2023.
This idea of the future is not radically different from the game we play with search engines today. You bid to be at the top based on a user’s query, or you work on your content to rank high organically.
The same process will happen but with less screen, and more anticipation of the user’s needs or next purchase.
When the assistant recommends a product, it will try to match to the user’s needs, history, and preferences. Google does this today with search results. Your website gets rewarded for relevancy. Everyone tries to game the SEO algorithm but ultimately if you have great content that solves the searcher’s problems google knows it and ranks you higher. There is no silver bullet.
Tune in next week for episode 28: my upcoming interview with Jon Chu, an expert in voice first ecommerce and retail.
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Hear my conversation with Brielle Nickoloff, Voice UX Designer at Witlingo. We discussed what the startup is doing to help podcasters, politicians, entrepreneurs, authors, comedians, and other content creators or personal brand promoters get voice skills onto Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant quickly and easily.
“Castlingo is the easiest way to publish short audios to let your audience listen to what you have to say.”
Brielle Nickoloff is a Lead of Voice User Experience Design and Research at Witlingo, a Washington D.C., based startup that builds products and solutions for Voice First devices and platforms, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Brielle earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Linguistics and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Much of Brielle’s research in the space began with a closer look at the ways one’s emotional reaction to a voice interface is notably more inflated than reactions to other types of user interfaces. She loves to design for maximally accessible and minimally intrusive technology by leveraging the beauty of natural human language.
40% of adults now use voice search once per day. Read more Voice First Facts from Witlingo.
Follow Brielle Nickoloff on Twitter: @ElleForLanguage (I love her handle!)
