Beetle Moment Marketing Podcast

How do we design technology that is both smart for business and good for people? This conversation asks questions about our approach for voice and AI, oncoming voice tech issues such as deep fakes, and privacy issues such as data mining by Facebook and other tech companies. Author and keynote speaker Kate O'Neill is known around the world as The Tech Humanist. Hear her great approach to keeping technology human and what it will take for emerging technology to be successful from a business standpoint.

Timestamps:

03:15 How do we approach voice design from a human centric way that is also good for business?

04:30 Weather skill example - take context about what someone using the skill needs, like an umbrella

05:20 Business might build voice tech or other tech in order to check a box but it’s better to build for the person on the other end

06:00 Don’t ask “What’s our AI strategy?” - steak back and say “What are we trying to accomplish as a business? 07:00 Who are we building for and how can we serve their needs?”

06:20 Create alignment and relevance between the business and people outside it

07:10 Avoid unintended consequences of technology as it becomes capable of such scale

07:35 Google Translatotron and deep fakes: Translatotron translates spoken word into another language while retaining the VOICE of the original speaker. Read more: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/translatotron.

08:40 Google would now have your voice - what will they do with it? Voice synthesis and deep fakes - the terrifying possibilities (overall: cool but scary)

How we should approach technology such as the Babelfish (Hitchhiker’s Guide) - simultaneous translation that does not lose integrity originating from the sound of your voice. But one step further: there is sampling of your voice that is sufficient for ML (machine learning) and AI to synthesize your voice.

09:30 Companies must govern themselves (e.g. Google)

09:50 Government has a responsibility to regulate privacy and data models

10:40 Kate doesn’t have smart speakers in her home because we don’t have a precedent for protecting user data, she says

11:20 Facebook Ten Year Challenge (Kate’s tweet went viral in January 2019 over the ten year old photo trend next to current photos of themselves) - she pointed out that this data could be training facial recognition algorithms on predicting aging

13:20 We have seen memes and games that ask you to provide structured information turn out to be data mining (e.g. Cambridge Analytics) - we have good reason to be cautious

14:40 "Everything we do online is a genuine representation of who we are as people, so that data really should be treated with the utmost respect and protection. Unfortunately, it isn't always." - Kate

15:00 Do we need government to regulate tech?

16:10 “Ask forgiveness, not permission” is clearly the case with Facebook so why are users so forgiving?

20:00 What does a future social network look like where there are fewer privacy and data mining and algorithm concerns?

Extra info:

Deep fake (a portmanteau of "deep learning" and "fake") is a technique for human image synthesis based on artificial intelligence. It is used to combine and superimpose existing images and videos onto source images or videos using a machine learning technique known as generative adversarial network.

Deep fakes and voice emulation: idea of voice skins and impersonation for fraud:

https://qz.com/1699819/a-new-kind-of-cybercrime-uses-ai-and-your-voice-against-you/

"In March, fraudsters used AI-based software to impersonate a chief executive from the German parent company of an unnamed UK-based energy firm, tricking his underling, the energy CEO, into making an allegedly urgent large monetary transfer by calling him on the phone. The CEO made the requested transfer to a Hungarian supplier and was contacted again with assurances that the transfer was being reimbursed immediately. That too seemed believable."

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Topics:

• 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

Guests:

Dave Kemp, Business Development Manager at Oaktree Products, Inc.

FuturEar.co

@Oaktree_Dave

Katherine Prescott, Founder & Editor at VoiceBrew

@kbprescott

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Guest: Amy Hoover

Show notes coming soon

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The customer is on their own hero's journey. Brian Roemmele explains what brands need to do to build longterm successful customer relationships. Every brand has an emotional connection to the people who use their products. But some covet it better than others. Brian and I discussed brand narratives and personas, touching on archetypes and Carl Jung, and even the neurochemistry of purchases and loyalty. My favorite part of the conversation is when Brian explained why the female voice is hardcoded to be perceived as authoritative.

Brian’s theory:

All products, companies, and brands are a relationship with their consumer. They have defining points as any human relationship does

Show notes: beetlemoment.com/podcast episode 53

02:00 How do we build a relationship in which our customer is the hero? (e.g. Storybrand framework)

02:53 All products, companies, and brands are a relationship with their consumer.

03:20 Every purchase is an emotional purchase - neuropeptides

04:00 Every brand has an emotional connection to the people who use their products. Some covet it better than others. This means a narrative is being spun overtly or covertly all the time. See Apple.

07:15 Neuropeptide release of a transaction or purchase - pleasure in the body, your cells will remember this

08:15 Archetypes, introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, are models of people, behaviors, or personalities. Jung suggested that archetypes are inborn tendencies that influence behavior.

08:30 Voice has the opportunity unlike any other one (including film) to create a rich deep emotional lifelong connection with the customer.

09:00 The human agenda is connection

09:55 A voice comes from a person - it’s not a thing - it has a persona

10:25 We instantly categorize anything we hear or see anthropomorphically because of flee or flight mechanism

11:05 Your brand has a voice: who is it? Fashion brand example from Brian’s work

12:05 You need to assign a Jungian or Myers Briggs archetype to your brand

12:30 Your customer is on their own hero’s journey

14:15 The voice of authority is and always will be a female.

16:10 Anthropologically and culturally, the wise woman (hence the archetype) was always the leader of the tribe until western culture labeled them witches

20:15 If a brand keeps us too reptilian we are probably not going to be longterm fans

20:20 It’s not the brand we connect to, it’s the story and its role in our own narrative (e.g. Thomas the Tank Engine)

21:15 Brand expression is to attract members of a desired tribe

22:20 When we build voice brands

Connect with Brian Roemmele:

Twitter | LinkedIn

Connect with Emily Binder:

emilybinder.com | Twitter | LinkedIn

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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 photos filters or voice skins - begin as a bolt-on and a novelty. But imagine where they’re headed. Let’s think about rich, contextual experiences.

Enjoy this mini episode! Our regular interview format will resume in January 2020.

Full show notes here.

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