Voice on Voice

2022 is now a thing of the past, and a new year is here. CES is in full swing, and coverage for the annual technology event continues through the end of the week. While we await news of more exciting innovations in the conversational AI space, the past few weeks have brought some promising news: startups raising money, new venture funds targeting voice, and promising news in the world of smart home standards and interoperability, giving voice assistants and devices even more capability.

The big news this month comes courtesy of Sonde and Voiceitt, two voice AI startups who have raised nearly $25 million between the two of them—showcasing new ways to apply voice and conversational AI are still being discovered and refined. In Sonde’s case, they’re focused on diagnosing mental and physical fitness using just voice. And in Voiceitt’s case, they’re focused on making voice inputs accessible to a wider audience, including those whose voices are impaired or don’t fit the traditional mold.

This week, we bring you news from the worlds of Disney and Walmart, both of whom are bringing voice AI into new consumer spaces: the resort and the museum, respectively. In Wal-Mart's case, the voice AI is being paired with a lifelike hologram, heralding new and lifelike opportunities created from a combination of emerging technologies.

Congratulations to Amazon’s Alexa—you turned eight this year! That’s eight years since Alexa and Echo smart speakers appeared on the scene, driving so much adoption of voice and conversational AI in the past decade. So it’s fitting that today’s edition of Voice on Voice centers on Alexa and the changing world it’s helped to make.

Today’s Voice on Voice profiles no groundbreaking changes in the industry, but it does point to something we can rely on: the “intelligence” in “artificial intelligence” is constantly improving, whether it be for Google Assistant’s smart home commands, or a custom assistant’s ability to help medical professionals better serve their patients.

Today’s roundup of voice-related stories highlights some movement in the enterprise voice assistant world—with conversational AI assistant Xembly quadrupling their financial success by raising $15 million. Plus, payment processing service Square adds conversational AI into their Square Messages platform.

This week’s newsletter is Amazon-centric, and no, that’s not because we at RAIN are loving Rings of Power (although we are!) No, just last week, Amazon held their annual Devices & Services event. At this year’s event, they made several announcements about their product lineup including updates to the Fire TV boxes, Kindles, Eero mesh devices, the Astro security system, Ring, and—of course—Echo and other Alexa-powered hardware.

Google continues the trend of trying to make talking to a voice assistant easier by simplifying ways to “wake up” their Assistant, using new customizable quick phrases. Amazon, meanwhile, is experimenting with injecting ads into common questions.

Have you ever wanted to control a video game with your voice? That reality is fast approaching. In this issue, we spotlight Amazon’s new integrations with video games, part of a broad trend of voice integration being a key part of multimodal (multi-input and multi-output) experiences. We also highlight two stories related to innovations in the restaurant industry. In these, we see companies like ConverseNow and OpenCity join the march of startups invested in providing voice AI in restaurants and drive-thrus. Read on to learn more.

Universal Studios, who owns parks in California, Florida, Japan, Singapore, and Beijing, recently filed a patent for incorporating voice commands into their rides. It details an interactive version of the Pepper’s Ghost effect (used to cast “holograms” or “ghost-like images” on panes of glass). With a patent like this, figures like wizards from Harry Potter, dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, or Nintendo characters like Mario and Bowser could appear in these panes of glass and move or change based on what you say and gesture, heralding a new style of interactive ride that could help Universal Studios bolster sales and compete with other amusement parks.