The Future of Alexa in Canada

03/26/19 • 13 min

In this episode, Teri talks about the changes that have been taking place in the Alexa in Canada Community stemming from the involvement of community members.

Enjoy the Show!

Based on the way voice technology is evolving, Teri realizes that at some point in the future he might have to slightly change the focus of the Alexa in Canada community, but he wouldn’t want to do that without feedback from community members. He shares his thought process on the show so that community members can share their feedback on how the community should move forward.

The Voice in Canada Flash Briefing

March 25th 2019 was the 400th episode of the flash briefing.
It’s been fantastic, a lot of fun and a lot of work for Teri, but it’s a way that he can stay in tune with what’s going on in the world of Alexa and provide that to the Alexa in Canada community and the world on a daily basis.
It has been downloaded and listened to well over 100,000 times in just over a year.

The Alexa in Canada Podcast

It has been doing exceptionally well.
Teri has been doing it on a weekly basis.
The show continues to grow and generate interest.
There’s a lot of interest in having guests come on the podcast to share their stories and what they’re doing in the voice technology space and specifically with Alexa.

The Blog

It has been very successful.
People are finding the community organically through Google searches due to the content. When they search something, very often it’s the Alexa in Canada Community that comes up when they are searching on Google. That has been guided by what the Alexa in Canada members want to hear, and so Teri creates content that the members want to hear about and spread to others.

The Future of the Community

There are several competitors for Amazon Alexa including Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and so on. There are people who ask Teri about these other voice assistants and he is currently conducting a survey at AlexainCanada.ca/Future to find out the following:
Would you like to learn more about these other voice assistants and the way that they impact Canadians specifically?
How do you use your devices (Are you using other devices in addition to Alexa)?
Are you using voice technology during your everyday life, or as part of your business?
What are the challenges that you have with voice technology and how can Teri help you with those challenges?

Supporting the Community

Teri is looking into some ways of generating some revenue from the community in terms of having sponsors for the podcast, flash briefing or website.
People can support the community by purchasing things through Teri’s affiliate link at AlexainCanada.ca/Amazon.
Teri is thinking of creating a voluntary subscription model where members can choose to contribute a small financial amount on a regular basis to support the community. There is a great service called Patreon that allows people to do that.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Teri talks about the changes that have been taking place in the Alexa in Canada Community stemming from the involvement of community members.

Enjoy the Show!

The Voice in Canada Flash Briefing

March 25th 2019 was the 400th episode of the flash briefing.
It’s been fantastic, a lot of fun and a lot of work for Teri, but it’s a way that he can stay in tune with what’s going on in the world of Alexa and provide that to the Alexa in Canada community and the world on a daily basis.
It has been downloaded and listened to well over 100,000 times in just over a year.

The Alexa in Canada Podcast

It has been doing exceptionally well.
Teri has been doing it on a weekly basis.
The show continues to grow and generate interest.
There’s a lot of interest in having guests come on the podcast to share their stories and what they’re doing in the voice technology space and specifically with Alexa.

The Blog

It has been very successful.
People are finding the community organically through Google searches due to the content. When they search something, very often it’s the Alexa in Canada Community that comes up when they are searching on Google. That has been guided by what the Alexa in Canada members want to hear, and so Teri creates content that the members want to hear about and spread to others.

The Future of the Community

There are several competitors for Amazon Alexa including Google, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and so on. There are people who ask Teri about these other voice assistants and he is currently conducting a survey at AlexainCanada.ca/Future to find out the following:
Would you like to learn more about these other voice assistants and the way that they impact Canadians specifically?
How do you use your devices (Are you using other devices in addition to Alexa)?
Are you using voice technology during your everyday life, or as part of your business?
What are the challenges that you have with voice technology and how can Teri help you with those challenges?

Supporting the Community

Teri is looking into some ways of generating some revenue from the community in terms of having sponsors for the podcast, flash briefing or website.
People can support the community by purchasing things through Teri’s affiliate link at AlexainCanada.ca/Amazon.
Teri is thinking of creating a voluntary subscription model where members can choose to contribute a small financial amount on a regular basis to support the community. There is a great service called Patreon that allows people to do that.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

The Optimistic Technology Futurist - Ian Utile

In this episode, Teri welcomes Ian Utile, an innovative strategist, business development executive, entrepreneur, optimistic tech futurist, and keynote speaker.

Welcome, Ian Utile!

Ian is the co-founder of Kukui Corp, a company ranked by Inc 500 as the #1 fastest growing private organizations in San Jose (#76 in the US). He specializes in starting software tech companies and is a partner in different non-tech projects. He is also the founder of WMVAI (We Magnify Voice for Attention and Influence), a B2B SaaS platform that automates posting content to Amazon Alexa. WMVAI will in future be available in Google Home/Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Apple Siri, and Samsung Bixby. Ian's hobby is supporting large international non-profits.

Teri and Ian met at the Alexa Conference. Ian was there live streaming some of the content and Teri did a live interview with him that was broadcasted to both their audiences. Ian is very excited about voice technology and he comes on to the podcast to share some of his really cool ideas for the future, and where we are going with voice technology.

Attending the Alexa Conference

He was excited about the Alexa Conference because the people that are developing tech today and vision for where voice as operating system is going to go were going to be at the conference.

Vision of the Future for Voice

The last interface is voice. The likelihood of anything else replacing voice is very low.
Voice devices will understand us better than any human being does, and we will understand what they communicate to us better than other human beings can communicate to us.
The benefactors of voice being the last interface will include the billions of people who cannot read, write or understand the most common languages. Those people, who have the least amount of opportunities will become productive in society.
Future scenario: Imagine a future where when you have a thought of something you need to do, you can tell Alexa, “Hey, Alexa. I just thought of a business idea. I want you to go to domains.com and I want you to buy TerisNewIdea.com” Alexa says, “It’s not available, but TerisNewIdea.io is available”, and you say, “Okay, great. Buy the domain and get me the five sites.....” Alexa does it in 7 seconds because she doesn’t need time to think or contact anybody. She just does what needs to be done.
People won’t need to have all the right training, certifications, connections, and relationships. The voice operating system will become a real companion to a person.

The Impact Voice will have on the Elderly in the Future

There are 10,000 people on average in America that turn 65 every day.
Iron Man or the Avengers movies have a great example of augmented reality in Jarvis. This Jarvis kind of operating system will not start the way we see it in the movies. It will start by being an audio system like an Alexa, maybe augmented by a TV screen.
Future scenario: Imagine a future 2021 or 2024 when an elderly person has an Alexa in their room, they wake up in the morning and there is a sensor that detects that they have woken up, the lights will turn on in just the way that is best for their physiology, the TV screen will come up, and a photograph of his/her family members will come up on the screen. Alexa will then talk to him/her in a familiar voice, for example the voice of his/her deceased spouse, explaining all the things that he/she could be forgetting every day due to dementia.
If we get people to start thinking through voice as an operating system with a long view, we’ll make much better decisions about what we build, what we promote, what we stand behind, and what we support, because we will be thinking about our great, great, great children that we will never meet, but who we will affect with our actions today.

The Silver Lining

There are two most important core technologies; Voice and Blockchain.
Voice as an operating system is the most important technology that there is ever going to be for individual human beings. Voice will make a more pleasurable and productive impact on our lives than any other technology.
Blockchain will be used to ensure data security and enable existing and new organizations to be semi or fully decentralized. Voice technology devices will have to release some of the control that they have in the centralized power system and give people access to their data. The Blockchain ledger being used will hold the related company accountable. The company and the technology will be held accountable. It’s going to be very hard for hyper-centralized companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to compete with the new emerging structures unless they themselves are willing to make some change...

Next Episode

The Future of Alexa in Canada - Part 2

In this episode, Teri releases the results of the Future of Alexa in Canada survey to give us a clue as to where we are going with a lot of the features within the Alexa in Canada and Voice in Canada brands.

And the Results are....!

Teri was overwhelmed by the 95+ responses he got from the survey. The feedback will be very valuable when coming up with a way forward for the Alexa in Canada community.

Survey Question 1: How comfortable are you with voice technology?

13.8% are beginners (new users of voice technology). This demonstrates that the podcast and flash briefing should be putting out some of the basic information on how to get started with voice devices, and so on.
47.9% are somewhat comfortable with voice devices.
38.3% consider themselves advanced users of voice technology.
The audience of the Alexa in Canada Podcast has different needs as far as where they are in their journey of using voice assistants.
Teri continuously tries to provide value for people at different stages of their journey in using voice technology.
In future, there will be some more content geared towards the different groups, but all the groups will have access to all the content.

Survey Question 2: Which voice assistants do you use?

97.7% of the respondents use Amazon Alexa. There were 3 people who said they don’t use Amazon Alexa.
42.6% use Apple Siri while 31.9% use Google Assistant.
There were less people who use Microsoft Cortana, Samsung Bizby, and other voice assistants.

Survey Question 3: Where do you use your voice assistant? Do you use your voice assistant to control smart home devices?

98% said they use their voice assistants at home.
40% said they use voice assistants on their iOS phones, 27% on their Android phones, and 29.5% use it in their cars.
62.1% said they use their voice assistants to control smart home devices.

Survey Question 4: Which best describes your use of voice technology?

88.4% of people said they use their voice assistants in their everyday lives while 31.6% said that they consider voice technology to be a hobby of theirs, meaning they are very interested in it.

Survey Question 5: Which resources do you find most useful?

56.2% of people said that they the website and the blog to be the most useful resource of the Alexa in Canada community.
55.1% of people said they found the flash briefing to be one of the most useful resources.

Survey Question 6: Which of the specific features do you find most useful?

82.6% of people like learning about Alexa commands meaning they like being told what to say to their devices.
56.5% of people said they like Alexa tutorials.
48.9% of people said that they find skill reviews and hardware/smart home device recommendations useful.
27% of people said that they like hearing about different sales and deals that Teri has been trying to highlight for the community.

Survey Question 7: How did you first discover our community?

39.8% of the respondents found the Alexa in Canada resource through Google searches which demonstrates that the content is ranking high on Google.
18% of the people found the community through Facebook.
17.2% of respondents found the Alexa in Canada community through the Voice in Canada Flash Briefing.

Survey Question 8: What is your favorite part about Alexa in Canada?

Some people said that its current and Canadian. That seemed to be an overarching theme.
Some people wrote that the page is helpful and informative. They loved the information of new skills, instructions on how to use new skills, hardware reviews, the flash briefings, and the podcasts.
Somebody said that they have actually listened to the podcasts from number one until now since discovering the podcast.
The Facebook community does their best to help others.
Someone wrote that they like the attitude and the style of the podcast, and the rest of the brand.

Survey Question 9: Ways that it can be improved

There has been a misconception that Alexa in Canada is the official Amazon Alexa in Canada website, which prompted some people to make suggestions or ask questions about issues that only Amazon can handle. One person said, “Stop treating us like lesser customers than the Americans”
In AlexainCanada.ca/29, Dave Isbitski gave the official Amazon response explaining why it takes longer for Canadians to get some of the features compared to Americans.
A lot of people said they like it the way it is.
There was a suggestion to create a...