WHY HE MADE THE LIST // The founder of Amazon was once known as an online bookseller, but is now better thought of as a disrupter of many industries. Amazon disrupted online retailing, offline retailing, cloud computing, and media before introducing a small black cylinder that you could talk to back in 2014. It is unlikely that voice assistants would be the phenomenon they are today without the force of will exerted by Jeff Bezos and his management team to re-introduce the concept of the voice assistant in general, and introduce it for the first time as a smart home utility. The modern voice assistant era was led by Apple’s Siri which launched with great fanfare but then stagnated. It never quite achieved the original vision. Google invested to catch Siri, but there was no momentum behind consumer usage so it also stopped short of implementing a big vision. Voice assistants because of Siri became viewed as either a novelty or nice-to-have app navigation tool while on-the-go. Alexa changed that, but not before Amazon committed billions of dollars in R&D, acquisitions, and staffing. That investment followed by rapid consumer adoption led to reactions by Google, Samsung, and others and the voice assistant arms race kicked into high gear. Far-field voice assistants are truly the invention that Amazon contributed to the market, but even more importantly, Jeff Bezos was instrumental in creating the moment that sparked rapid innovation and voice assistants’ second wave of adoption.

Amazon Announces 80K Alexa Skills & Bezos Earnings Release Quote Focuses on Alexa

Bezos Says Alexa and Echo Are Not About Shopping

#2 // Adam Cheyer

VP of R&D, Samsung Mobile

Co-Founder & VP Engineering, Viv Labs

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // It is hard to think of anyone that has had more influence on the rise of voice assistants over the past 25 years than Adam Cheyer. He built and demonstrated his first voice assistant in 1993. Fifteen years later he partnered with Dag Kittlaus and Tom Gruber to found the company Siri that was acquired in 2010 by Apple and became the iPhone 4s feature Siri. After two years working on stabilizing and extending Siri features for Apple, he left and again joined with Dag Kittlaus to found Viv Labs which was acquired by Samsung in 2016 and eventually became the Bixby 2.0 voice assistant. Bezos may have seized a moment by introducing Alexa into the home, but Adam has dedicated a career to a singular vision of creating a personal and robust voice assistant. And, he is directly responsible for two of the top five consumer voice assistants in the market today. Adam is widely admired among developers in the industry for his expertise and longevity working with AI and speech technologies.

Listen to the Adam Cheyer interview on Voicebot Podcast

Bixby Could Land in 500 Million Devices Annually

#3 // Sundar Pichai

CEO, Google

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Google clearly has a well-earned reputation for driving new innovation that shape industry sectors but has also become the ultimate fast-follower in new technology shifts. Android and Gmail are just a couple of successful case studies. Google Assistant falls squarely in this category. The company had introduced several voice solutions for mobile devices following Siri and then Pichai led the effort to change Google’s focus from mobile-first to AI-first. Google Assistant is one of the pillars of that shift. Google has invested heavily in the space since 2016, acquiring API.ai (now known as Dialogflow) while rolling out Assistant in over 30 languages and introducing three smart speakers and two smart displays while integrating with thousands of other devices. The company also became the first to have a voice assistant available on over one billion devices worldwide. Many people have had a hand in Google Assistant’s rise, but it is hard to see how this much progress could have been made without Pichai’s full support. Besides, he was also the person that first demonstrated Google Duplex to the world. Whether his vision originally or not, that demo is already an iconic moment in the history of voice assistants.

Google Duplex Shows the Way to a True Virtual Assistant

Assistant on Phones is Taking Off & Changes the Way We Think About Voice Assistant Growth

#4 // Keyvan Mohajer

President & CEO, SoundHound

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Keyvan Mohajer co-founded Soundhound, known for the app that will tell you in seconds what song is playing. However, his goal from the start was to build a voice assistant. The song recognition was a way station to keep venture capitalists happy while he continued to fund and develop the technology behind what is now the Hound assistant and Houndify platform. While Amazon, Google, and Samsung pursue consumer adoption directly, Mohajer has positioned SoundHound as a go-to assistant option for companies that want a white-label solution that offers full control over the user experience and data. The approach seems to be working. SoundHound has raised over $200 million in venture capital funding including at $100 round in 2018 that valued the company at over $1 billion. And, it now boasts customers ranging from Mercedes and Honda to Pandora, Midea, and Orange.

Listen to the Keyvan Mohajer interview on Voicebot Podcast

SoundHound Closes $100 Million Funding Round From Strategic Investors

#5 // Jack Ma

Founder & Executive Chairman, Alibaba

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Chinese entrepreneur turned billionaire, Ma started online marketplace Alibaba in 1999. Under Alibaba Group the company grew into a multinational conglomerate specializing in technology, e-commerce, and retail. A close watcher of Amazon’s business model, Alibaba Group introduced a smart speaker named Tmall Genie in 2017 that is powered by an open-platform AI voice assistant, AliGenie also sometimes confusingly referred to as Tmall Genie. Reports from China show Alibaba with about 40% smart speaker market share and its installed base will rise to over 20 million users. In addition, Tmall Genie auto is being integrated into cars from Volvo, BMW, Honda, Audi and Renault for the Chinese market. Alibaba is also using its voice assistant to proactively schedule package delivery times with customers reportedly without any humans in the loop. Rival Baidu now has broader reach with its DuerOS assistant available in several hundred million devices, but Ma is the best known spokesperson for the rise of voice assistants in China and is shaping how many people view the space in the world’s most populous country.

China Smart Speaker Adoption to Grow 166% in 2019, Alibaba to Maintain Market Share Lead

Alibaba Extends Tmall Genie with a New In-Car Smart Speaker Partnership with Automakers

#6 // Todd Mozer

Chairman & CEO, Sensory

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Sensory was pioneering the use of neural networks in the 1990’s and provides underlying voice technology today for companies ranging from AT&T and Huawei to Garmin and Waze. You will also find Sensory technology used as the wake word engine for some of the most popular consumer voice assistants. Mozer founded the company in 1994 to enable people to communicate with consumer electronics the way we do with each other, by voice. Sensory builds software and hardware products for on-device voice recognition, biometric identification, and other use cases. The company’s technology has been embedded in over three billion devices, including more than 100 models on display at CES 2019 alone. Mozer maintains a lower profile than many of the people on this list, but every manufacturer in this space pays attention to Sensory and its continually updated product line.

Listen to the Todd Mozer interview on Voicebot Podcast

Q&A: Todd Mozer talks Sensory

#7 // Josh Montgomery

Founder & CEO, Mycroft AI

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Joshua Montgomery founded Mycroft AI in early 2015 and since that time has done two successful Kickstarter campaigns, graduated from both Tech Stars and 500 Startups accelerators, raised $3 million in equity capital and delivered the world’s first open source voice assistant. He, the Mycroft team and a growing group of volunteer developers have been busy contributing to both the open source software project and delivering smart speaker and smart display devices that focus on user security along with functionality. Montgomery points to Android as an example of where open source technology increasingly outperforms closed systems. In the voice assistant space, he sees Amazon, Google, and others all following the closed system iOS-like approach of the mobile ecosystem with Mycroft as the leading open source alternative. Mycroft may be looking up at the giants of technology today, but is clearly a company to watch which could disrupt the entire sector if the scalability and customization options take off with developers.

Listen to the Josh Montgomery interview on Voicebot Podcast

Mycroft AI Posts Online Public Offering for Equity Investment

#8 // Amir Hirsh

Founder & CEO, Audioburst

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Hirsh founded Audioburst in 2014 after a long career in cybersecurity with the idea of transcribing and indexing all audio content to make search and discovery as easy for audio as it is for text. Think of it as Google search applied against YouTube, but in this case it is returning not videos, but audio content. And, it goes so step further, the extract just the audio content (i.e. bursts) related to the user’s query. The natural medium for voice queries is audio responses, but most content today visual or text-based. Audiobust is now transcribing and indexing thousands of radio programs and podcasts in near real-time to provide instant access to the largest library of searchable audio content available. Voice assistants need content for users. One way to generate that content is to promote the development of thousands of voice apps. Another way is to harvest the audio content already generated each day. Audiobust is currently focused on signing up industry partners and offers the voice search and personalized playlists through Android Auto, Samsung Bixby, and Flipboard, and has raised $25 million from Samsung Ventures, Dentsu, and Hyundai.

Listen to the Amir Hirsh interview on Voicebot Podcast

Audioburst and LGE Announce In-Car Infotainment Partnership

#9 // Rupal Patel

Founder & CEO, VocaliD

WHY SHE MADE THE LIST // Patel founded VocaliD in 2014 to provide voice prostheses for people that cannot speak in their own voices. Instead of people without the ability to speak on their own all sounding like the same few synthetic voices, VocaliD’s technology can create entirely new and distinct voices so the speechless can have their own unique sound. Patel has been a professor at Northeastern University for 16 years with joint appointments in the health science and computer science departments. She also has held affiliate faculty positions at Harvard and MIT. Patel’s mission to provide synthetic voices for the speechless has recently extended into working with brands and other organizations. Increasingly these organizations want to stand out with their own distinctive sounding voices as they launch solutions their users can access through voice assistants.

Listen to the Rupal Patel interview on Voicebot Podcast

Voices.com to Offer Custom, Synthetic Voices Through Partnership with VocaliD

#10 // Oren Jacob

Software Engineering Manager, Apple

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Oren Jacob began shaping how people thought about voice interaction around the time of Siri’s launch on the iPhone. His 20-year career making movies at Pixar offered a different perspective about voice assistant interactions than the engineers and designers focused on utilitarian applications and efficient, short engagements. He co-founded PullString in 2011 (originally known as ToyTalk) and went on to raise over $40 million in venture capital before the company was acquired by Apple in late 2018. Along the way, PullString worked on high profile projects for Mattel, Amazon’s Grand Tour, and SpongeBob as well as launching the Converse SaaS solution for building, deploying and maintaining conversational apps. PullString shut down its independent operations and software after the acquisition and it is not yet clear how the technology will ultimately be used to support Apple’s new ambitions for Siri and conversational engagement. However, this is another area where Jacob’s influence will continue to have an impact given Apple’s unique position in the voice ecosystem.

Listen to the Oren Jacob interview on Voicebot Podcast

Apple Acquired PullString – Here’s What It Means for the Voice Community

#11 // Rand Hindi

Co-Founder & CEO, Snips

WHY HE MADE THE LIST // Dr. Rand Hindi is an entrepreneur and researcher in artificial intelligence and privacy. He is the CEO at Snips, an edge-based, private-by-design voice solution for OEMs that was founded in 2013 and has raised over $18 million in funding. Whereas the popular consumer voice assistants and other leading solutions leverage cloud-based technology for speech recognition and intent extraction, Snips delivers narrowly focused voice assistant solutions that can run completely on disconnected devices such as household appliances. Hindi has been elected as a TR35 by the MIT Technology Review, as a “30 under 30” by Forbes, and is a lecturer at Sciences Po in Paris. He was previously a member of the French Digital Council where he focused on AI and Privacy issues.

Listen to the Rand Hindi interview on Voicebot Podcast

Snips to Enter Smart Speaker Arena and Fund the Effort with an ICO