The Last Interface with Brian Roemmele

02/19/19 • 82 min

In this episode, Teri welcomes Brian Roemmele, “The Oracle of Voice” and “The Modern Day Thomas Edison”

Welcome Brian Roemmele!

Brian is the consummate Renaissance man. He is a scientist, researcher, analyst, connector, thinker and doer. He is also referred to as the “Oracle of Voice” and is actually credited for having come up with the term “Voice First”. Over the long, winding arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects along the way.

He actively shares his findings and observations across fora like Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Inc, Gizmodo, Medium, Quora (An exclusive Quora top writer for: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013), Twitter (quoted and published), Around the Coin (earliest crypto currency podcast), Breaking Banks Radio and This Week In Voice on VoiceFirst.fm that surfaces everything from Bitcoin to Voice Commerce. He recently spoke at the 2019 Alexa Conference about where voice technology is going and introduced some of his incredible ideas.

Where Voice Technology is going

The talk he did at the Alexa Conference was dubbed “The Last Interface” and was based on the term “What if?”
The Last Interface refers to the last interface that we will have with technology.
We type to computers because they cannot understand our volition and our intent.
Computers are already intelligent enough with current technology to take a user’s context and present to them the information that they are searching for. That’s the premise of The Last Interface.

Intelligence Amplification

Brian presented this idea by searching through history how we developed the concept of why we speak (why we developed language). He found that we did it because our brain got too large.
Humans had to offload memories into archival systems which became known as writing. Typing is an example of an extension of an archival system which means we are storing the things that we can’t pass on generationally on an offloaded system. Computers took over that and now we archive in systems and places like websites, Google, PDFs, and others, but it’s still an archival system and it still doesn’t transmit the volition and intent of an individual. The short term aspect is what Brian calls “The Intelligence Amplify”
He doesn’t fully believe in the concept of AI (Artificial Intelligence) because he doesn’t think we can fully define what intelligence is in humans and where it comes from, and therefore, we cannot artificially create it in any way, shape and form that is human like.
We have been trying to amplify our intelligence by archiving our world and our stories, whether they be allegorical, mythological or “factual”. Factual is as we see it today. All of our facts today will 1,000 to 10,000 years from now look allegorical to people because they will not be facts any longer, they will be seen as primitive.
The Intelligence Amplify takes in everything around us. How this works; in this world, with the technology that exists today, the moment you’re born to the moment you die, is a device that will have a camera and a microphone. Assume that it has the highest security you can ever imagine and it never goes on the internet (it has no internet connection). It’s recording everything you’ve ever seen, everything you’ve ever read, every comment you’ve made, every comment you’ve heard, and everything is archived. All those things will be presented to you as the basis of your AI to derive context and to understand not only your paradigm (how you make you as you because you are the sum total of the experiences, good and bad, that define us as human beings), and so it starts amplifying your intelligence.
During his talk at the 2019 Alexa Conference, he pointed out that the human being discards (exformation) over 99% of everything that comes through our senses.
With The Intelligence Amplify, the best of us can be amplified.

The Wisdom Keeper

When we die, everything is thrown away, but not in the world of The Last Interface, because the next stage is called The Wisdom Keeper.
The Wisdom Keeper (your Wisdom Keeper) is important because it is the sum total of all of your experiences, the essence of your experiences. Every human being has some wisdom to contribute to the world.
A person’s Wisdom Keeper will be their testament, who they were.

Listener Questions

Do you feel that society is actually ready for what Brian has described (The Last Interface, The Intelligence Amplifier and The Wisdom Keeper)
Will we ever be ready for the scenario that Brian is describing?
Will this happen by default (is ...

In this episode, Teri welcomes Brian Roemmele, “The Oracle of Voice” and “The Modern Day Thomas Edison”

Welcome Brian Roemmele!

Where Voice Technology is going

The talk he did at the Alexa Conference was dubbed “The Last Interface” and was based on the term “What if?”
The Last Interface refers to the last interface that we will have with technology.
We type to computers because they cannot understand our volition and our intent.
Computers are already intelligent enough with current technology to take a user’s context and present to them the information that they are searching for. That’s the premise of The Last Interface.

Intelligence Amplification

Brian presented this idea by searching through history how we developed the concept of why we speak (why we developed language). He found that we did it because our brain got too large.
Humans had to offload memories into archival systems which became known as writing. Typing is an example of an extension of an archival system which means we are storing the things that we can’t pass on generationally on an offloaded system. Computers took over that and now we archive in systems and places like websites, Google, PDFs, and others, but it’s still an archival system and it still doesn’t transmit the volition and intent of an individual. The short term aspect is what Brian calls “The Intelligence Amplify”
He doesn’t fully believe in the concept of AI (Artificial Intelligence) because he doesn’t think we can fully define what intelligence is in humans and where it comes from, and therefore, we cannot artificially create it in any way, shape and form that is human like.
We have been trying to amplify our intelligence by archiving our world and our stories, whether they be allegorical, mythological or “factual”. Factual is as we see it today. All of our facts today will 1,000 to 10,000 years from now look allegorical to people because they will not be facts any longer, they will be seen as primitive.
The Intelligence Amplify takes in everything around us. How this works; in this world, with the technology that exists today, the moment you’re born to the moment you die, is a device that will have a camera and a microphone. Assume that it has the highest security you can ever imagine and it never goes on the internet (it has no internet connection). It’s recording everything you’ve ever seen, everything you’ve ever read, every comment you’ve made, every comment you’ve heard, and everything is archived. All those things will be presented to you as the basis of your AI to derive context and to understand not only your paradigm (how you make you as you because you are the sum total of the experiences, good and bad, that define us as human beings), and so it starts amplifying your intelligence.
During his talk at the 2019 Alexa Conference, he pointed out that the human being discards (exformation) over 99% of everything that comes through our senses.
With The Intelligence Amplify, the best of us can be amplified.

The Wisdom Keeper

When we die, everything is thrown away, but not in the world of The Last Interface, because the next stage is called The Wisdom Keeper.
The Wisdom Keeper (your Wisdom Keeper) is important because it is the sum total of all of your experiences, the essence of your experiences. Every human being has some wisdom to contribute to the world.
A person’s Wisdom Keeper will be their testament, who they were.

Listener Questions

Do you feel that society is actually ready for what Brian has described (The Last Interface, The Intelligence Amplifier and The Wisdom Keeper)
Will we ever be ready for the scenario that Brian is describing?
Will this happen by default (is ...

Previous Episode

Interactive Storytelling with Amy Stapleton of Tellables

In this episode, Teri welcomes Amy Stapleton, the founder and CEO of Tellables, a company that excels in creating interactive storytelling for voice assistants and robots.

Welcome Amy!

Amy has been an IT professional for many years and her last stint was as IT manager at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. She retired early to focus on voice technology, specifically in storytelling, which led her to specialize in natural language and conversation, and designing interactive story experiences and games for talking voice assistants and conversational robots.

Amy comes on the show to talk to us about her new skill, “My Box of Chocolates”, and to explain how chocolates in this skill represent different stories. It’s a new type of interactive storytelling where we can have discussions with Alexa about what you’re listening to. The skill is available in Canada and Amy will actually looking for authors and will tell us how we can participate in the story making process.

Her First Skills and Starting Tellables

When Jibo (the social robot) was launched, it made Amy realize that people wanted to hear stories told by robots and voice assistants because they would consider them to be like characters in their home.
Her first storytelling Alexa skill was called “Listening Comprehension Practice” which had stories that were followed by some yes or no questions. The skill was more directed at children because they could listen to the stories and then test out their understanding of the content of the story by answering the questions.
The next skill they created was “Tricky Genie” and it became very popular. It’s more of a story game where Alexa tells a quick little anecdote about one or more characters who get themselves into some kind of predicament, and a genie pops up holding free sacks, and then the player has two chances to find the sack with the right solution.
They created other skills that were like Tricky Genie, but Amy wanted to move more into something that was based on conversational story telling where people could enjoy stories and be able to have conversations with Alexa about the stories.
They now have a content management system which allows an author to add a lot of additional content to a skill without having to republish the skill. They have opened up the system so that other authors can submit content for Tellables to use and publish as part of their live skills. The first skill where they implemented that is “My Box of Chocolates”

Conversational Storytelling

It’s based on the idea of a voice assistant telling someone a story. In the case of My Box of Chocolates, one of Tellables’ virtual chocolatiers tells a story to the voice assistant or robot user. The user therefore engages with a personality unlike when listening to, for example, a streaming audio book.
After someone hears one of the stories in My Box of Chocolates, Alexa (who is listening to the story with the person), will make a comment about what she thinks of the story, then she will ask the listener a question that the listener can respond to in a constrained number of ways, then based on the response, Alexa will make an appropriate follow-on response which is only one level deep. Tellables is working on developing the skill farther so that people can have a multi-turn conversations with Alexa about the story.

My Box of Chocolates

The basic concept of the skill is that Tellables has created a publishing platform where authors who like to write short stories can submit the stories for Tellables to publish.
Every month, Tellables publishes a virtual box of twelve candies that are chocolates, and each has a representation. People can go to the Tellables website to see an image of each chocolate and what it represents. They’re meant to be funny and relate to the story a person is listening to. Every month they come out with a new assortment, but people can still go back to the older stories if they want to.
The bots that tell the stories are called Chocolatiers. So far they have 4 chocolatiers (Coco, Brandon, Archie and Opal) with distinct personalities and different synthetic voices. Each voice is associated with a specific character that has a personality and a back story. Each character has an image.
For those who want to contribute their stories, they have to be a maximum of 275 words long and that fit within the personalities of any of the 4 chocolatiers in My Box of Chocolates.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

My Box of Chocolates

Next Episode

Voice Strategy with Emily Binder of Beetle Moment Marketing

In this episode, Teri welcomes Emily Binder, a leading voice marketing strategist and a consultant to brands.

Welcome, Emily Binder!

She is the founder of Beetle Moment Marketing, a voice-first marketing agency where she helps brands reach customers in this voice-first world. She is a frequently sort after speaker and received rave reviews at the 2019 Alexa Conference for her talks on marketing in this voice-first world. She comes on the show to talk about her background, why she is so enthusiastic about voice, sonic branding and why flash briefings are such an incredible opportunity when it comes to getting a brand’s voice heard in the voice-first world.

Background

She has been in marketing for over a decade and started out with a heavy focus on social media and content marketing. Over the last couple of years, she has shifted her core focus onto voice, but still works on social media.

The Compelling Nature of Voice

She was one of the early adopters of voice technology back in 2014. She got the 1st-Gen Echo early when it was gifted to her. It got her thinking about how the technology could be used to make marketing much easier, efficient and hassle-free.

The Graph on Adoption of Consumer Technology in the US

Emily has shared the graph at different conferences and it shows the adoption on consumer technology in the US from the time of introduction to the market until it reaches between 25% and 50% penetration.
The graph shows that the computer, radio, internet and smartphone all had quicker growing curves.
Smart speakers reached 50% of the US population in just a couple of years. Their curve on the graph was almost a hockey stick.
We are already at a point where we have more mobile phones/smartphones than there are people on the planet, and of course there will be more voice-activated smart devices.

Social Media Verses Voice

Social media is a problematic business model because it’s all based on manipulation and feedback loops. All products are ad-supported (ads are served based on mining users’ data)
A lot of the things that happen on social media are just about comparison and the highlight reel where people don’t always see the bloopers.
There is something very negative and nasty about social media for society as a whole.
The power and beauty of voice is that we can get off the negativeness of consuming social media.

A Fatigue for Apps

Research by Gartner shows that by 2019, 20% of brands will abandon their mobile apps.

The Importance of Voice to Brands

People want the convenience and ease of use so any brand that wants to figure out the easiest way for their customers to shop, should think about voice.
The voice assistant will be accessible everywhere so brands will need to optimize whatever kind of presence they have including websites, Amazon listings, and others, for voice. Optimizing for voice will be like SEO.

Sonic Branding

This refers to audio logos.
Marketers are focusing more on sonic branding (audio branding) as voice continues to rise.
A brand’s audio logo is critical in keeping customers happy and engaged.
An example, MasterCard just introduced their audio branding and they got modern musicians to help with it. It will play every time someone swipes their Mastercard and any other time they interact with MasterCard from listening to ads to being on hold with customer service. People will start to associate that sound with the brand.
When someone uses Venmo and there is that little cha-ching or cash register sound, they get a little physical sensation from knowing they have money.

Flash briefings

A flash briefing is a mini-podcast and is also referred to as a briefcast.
They can be heard every day on any Amazon Alexa device including smartphones through the Amazon app.
They’re usually about a minute long.
They’re very powerful because it’s warm, human, intimate audio going right into a customer’s ear on a daily basis.
A flash briefing must not go beyond 2 minutes.

The Beetle Moment Marketing Flash Briefing

Emily has had it for about a year.
She used to listen to flash briefings and realized she could make one herself. She has been podcasting for more than 10 years.
She realized that there weren’t many marketing oriented flash briefings so she saw an opportunity.

List of resources mentioned in this episode: