Voice Talks Will Explore Accessibility and Diversity on June 24
The next episode of Modev’s VOICE Talks Presented by Google Assistant will take a look at diversity and accessibility within the voice tech industry. The show, which recently earned a Webby award, will stream live on June 24 at 2 p.m. Eastern. Google Assistant’s co-lead of global product partnerships, Sofia Altuna, will host the discussion and presentation on the topic, titled “Why Inclusivity Builds a Better Voice Ecosystem.”
Inclusive Voices
Altuna will introduce the topic, as usual, explaining the concept and why it matters for the industry. The presentations will include experts from around the voice tech community sharing their viewpoints. Dr. Carl B. Mack, an engineer and former executive director at the National Society of Black Engineers, will kick off the presentations with the launch and explanation of his This Day in Black History voice app. The app was created using the Black Heritage Day IV calendar and enables users to discover more about black history and the important people and moments of that history every day. Penguin Random House Strategic Projects director Sara Dayton will then engage in a conversation with Matchbox Mobile’s chief technology officer Matthew Calamatta about the creation of the new Who Was Heroes app. The app connects to Penguin’s book series about important historical figures, extracting clips from the series of more than 100 books.
Next, Google senior director of product management Lilian Rincon will talk to Google global product partnerships lead Leslie Garcia-Amaya about their vision for applying diversity and inclusivity to developing better products. Google Assistant group product manager Bertrand Damiba and Alana Conner, a staff UX researcher for the Assistant Foundations at Google, will talk about how and why to make products inclusive and ensure anyone can use them.
Voice Talks News
“When we set out to create the VOICE community, we wanted to ensure it was inclusive of individuals of all backgrounds,” Modeve CEO Pete Erickson said in a statement. “The June VOICE Talks will look at how voice-enabled apps can share stories from the past to positively impact our future. We’re thrilled to welcome prominent guests on this month’s show who will highlight their work, which will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on future generations.”
Altuna will introduce each segment and share real-time responses with viewers using #AskSofia on Twitter. Voice Talks is also soliciting videos from viewers explaining how they would use voice for their own startup if they have not begun already. People who send in a video will have a chance to see it streamed and to win a Google Assistant device. Altuna and Ashwin Karuhatty from Google’s Cloud Database Partnerships will take the opportunity to recap some of the highlights of VOice Talks for the last year and have promised a major piece of news related to the next year of the program.
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