Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Wow, it hardly feels like a month ago that we landed in the US on an exploratory mission into the world of voice tech. I thought I’d share some highlights from our trip to Tennessee, where we not only got to tick off one of the big items on my vision board of going to Nashville, but also got to present at a big voice technology conference and learn more about what’s happening internationally with voice tech and conversational AI.

It was also a huge honour to attend a special event for women in conversational AI, celebrating the top 200 women from across the world working in this field.

The Siri story and AI predictions

It’s not often that you get to experience an iconic moment like when all four founders from the original Apple Siri team get back together to share their journey. I didn’t actually know the back story to the early days of Siri and it was really inspiring to hear about how Apple pursued the start-up and eventually they agreed to becoming part of the now ubiquitous Apple brand.

If you’d like to hear first-hand from the Siri founders about their predictions for the future, this is a very insightful video made as part of the conference dinner event on the first night.

https://youtu.be/oY7hLWgMI28

I’d be really interested about what you think about the future of AI:

• Will we have chips in our brain in the future to allow us to directly interface with AI?
• What do you think about using smartphones to help monitor health conditions at home?
• Will AI in the future be a force for good, or will it create more issues with scams and digital inequalities?

Nashville’s not all about the music!

Do you know what Nashville’s biggest industry is?

No, it’s not music, it’s actually healthcare!

Nashville is home to over 900 health related companies with the top 18 generating over $95 billion in global revenue.

One of the biggest names in Nashville healthcare is Sarah Cannon, who you might also know as Minnie Pearl. Minnie Pearl was a beloved American comedian and actress who shot to fame in the 1940s, performing on the Grand Ole Opry stage and made regular appearances on the Tonight Show. She was also a strong advocate for healthcare. She used her platform to raise awareness about important issues such as access to affordable care and the importance of preventive care. She donated millions of dollars to healthcare causes throughout her life. Her legacy lives on in the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville (right next to the hotel we were staying at), which is a world-leading clinical trials facility specialising in the development of new therapies and precision medicine for cancer patients.

The contrarian speaker

I met some really amazing people on our trip and a lot of the focus was on the ethics of things like ChatGPT. I especially liked one of the speakers, called Laura Preston, who was the "contrarian" speaker, but what she shared about her experiences of working in a chatbot company was truly fascinating. In her talk she described working with the “bot” which she called Brenda. In her role, she was required to monitor the chatbot interactions with customers and intervene for any queries that Brenda couldn’t respond to. There were two quotes from Laura’s talk that perfectly summed up some of the issues that these technologies present.

• “I wasn’t training Brenda to be more human, Brenda was training me to be more like a Bot.” In the work that Laura did, she was set impossible time constraints to respond to each query, where she literally had just minutes to resolve each issue, often responding to multiple queries at the same time. She said it literally was rewiring her brain and took over her life to the point where she was seeing chat transcripts in her dreams.
• “Brenda wasn’t a concierge; she was a bouncer.” Many of the interactions that Laura had to support were when someone asked a question outside of the standard scenarios that Brenda was trained to resolve. So if someone asked something outside of the norm, this meant people weren’t able to get support, as often even Laura couldn’t answer their questions about the property and rent agreements, because she was working remotely literally hundreds of miles away from the property. Laura witnessed many interactions from people with disabilities and with more complex financial backgrounds being turned away by the chatbot.

These two points alone were so thought provoking and I’d encourage you to check out Laura’s full article on her experiences here.

The future of hearables

During the conference they had a special track during the parallel sessions dedicated to health tech solutions. I particularly enjoyed the talk by Andrew Bellavia from AuraFutirity about hearables, essentially earbud devices with additional capabilities to just playing audio.

Conversational AI and audio technology is an exciting space at the moment with technologies, including hearables, creating new opportunities for people to engage in the spaces around them. For example, Bluetooth have a technology called Auracast. This technology allows remote broadcasting to earbuds and can provide information and interactive audio in public places. For more information on Auracast see here.

I think one of the best things about truly accessible tech is that it works for everyone and hearables have many use cases, making it easier to hear for people who are over stimulated in busy environments, for workers who need to be able to hold conversations but may be in a noisy environment, for parents or caregivers who need to be able to hear when someone needs them without perhaps waking a sleeping partner. Hearable devices can also be used to monitor other aspects of wellbeing such as balance and body temperature as well as respiration. If you want to check out the full talk on the hearables technology, the recording is here.

The latest Amazon developments

One of the main reasons for us going to the US (as well as Nashville being on my bucket list!), was so that we could meet with the Amazon Alexa team in person.

It was great to hear about their latest initiatives, in smart properties and the healthcare space. We also got to share with them our top things that we’d like to see in terms of enhancing the way Alexa works. We got a sneak peek at their new gesture controls and accessible controller buttons which the Amazon Alexa team have been developing in collaboration with an organisation called United Ability, who are based in Alabama in the USA. We are excited for when these new Alexa features and exciting accessibility focused technologies become available in the UK. And the prospect of being able to work more closely with the Alexa team, watch this space!

If you're interested in conversational AI and the work that we do with Alexa and smart homes, I'd be delighted to share more insights from the trip and things happening in the space across the world and here in Scotland.

There is a lot of potential with new voice technologies, especially large language models, synthetic voices, hearables and more, which we will be continuing to explore in our projects.