Voice Assistants
topic on 3 shows · 4 statements across 4 episodes
Innovators & Investors 
How I Built This 
the a16z Podcast
4 statements about Voice Assistants, every show
Ranjan: User Conditioning Narrows Broad AI Into Single-Purpose Utilities
“When you do it this way, people who struggle with it end up falling out, and they're not your users anymore. And the people who use it, they get trained to say a very particular phrase to you. So they cannot even explore what else can you do, because they will…”
Kumar: Traditional text-to-speech sounds flat because non-neutral tones risk sounding inappropriate
“And that's probably why, or it's one of the reasons why historically voice assistants feel so flat is that traditional text of speech, it's kind of like it can only be flat. Or in other words, if it tries to not be flat, it's very likely wrong.”
Voice Assistants Were Too Early; Breakthrough Will Come With AI Integration
“In my view, the voice assistants still, you know, their time is coming. I think they were just too early. Like now you see the startup companies trying to integrate voice assistants with the AI stuff. And do I believe in that? Yes. You know, is that 10 years a…”
Sofman: Vector gets 10-12 queries daily versus 1-2 for smart speakers
“And so Suddenly, like, when you look at voice assistants that have an average of maybe, like, one to two queries a day, and we're at, like, 10 to 12 even before we have a voice assistants built in, it causes us to ask a lot of questions of how do you leverage …”