Ep. 218 - NEXT 2019 Pre-Conference Series - Dylan Zwick - Pulse Labs

The 2019 NEXT pre-conference series is giving listeners an inside look into companies such as IBM, Voice Metrics, Ipsos, and Pulse Labs.. Join insight leaders on June 13 - 14 in Chicago for NEXT, where you can discover how technology and innovation are changing the market research industry. In this episode, Jamin Brazil interviews Dylan Zwick, Chief Product Officer at Pulse Labs. Find Dylan Online: LinkedIn Website: www.pulselabs.ai [00:01] Hi, I'm Jamie Brazil, and you're listening to the Happy Market Research podcast. This is a special episode that's connected to the Insights Association’s NEXT conference in Chicago, that is, this June 13th and 14th. My guest today is Dylan Zwick. Dylan. I said your last name, right? [00:22] That was correct. Yeah, Dylan Zwick. I'm always dead last in the alphabetical order. [00:27] That's funny. I was always first in photos because I am 5’8’’ so we have that objective position. Dylan is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Pulse Labs. Pulse Labs is a solution that enables users to launch and gather consumer opinions via voice devices such as Alexa and Google Home. Dylan, thanks for being on the Happy Market Research podcast today! [00:49] A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. [00:53] You are speaking at this year's NEXT event on voice. When did you first realize that voice was important? [00:57] So I first realized that voice was going to be big back in 2016 when I bought my first Echo. So I started playing around with Alexa, and realized that what had been the dream of science fiction now for decades, you know, the ability to speak and actually have a conversation with a computer was actually becoming science fact, you know, it was it was becoming reality. And so, I played around with building my own Alexa applications and started exploring the tools that were out there for developers and designers for Alexa application, and for voice applications more generally, and realized that this was going to be a huge space and also that I really wanted to be a part of it. So that’s what got me initially involved. [01:54] Yeah, I mean, Alexa in and of itself is really interesting. One of the things that I think is… If you pull back, YouTube right now, I forget what the data is, something like 60% of the Internet is there. It's a massive amount. And if you look at the bet that Google placed when they did that acquisition, it was, they consolidated the different product lines into a single thing, and then they centralized the KPI to one centralized point of focus, which was the number of daily videos unloaded. And that created so much focus from an R&D perspective that that was all anybody cared about. It wasn't predicated on revenue or eyeballs or anything like that. That was it. And then subsequently, of course, that was the tail that wagged the dog. Amazon is actually doing the exact same thing with respect to Alexa. I mean, my kids… My 12-year-old can create an Alexa skill. It is crazy easy how they have made the development side of this accessible. [02:52] Yeah, that's been a huge focus for Amazon. And the Alexa team is to open up as many tools for developing essentially applications or, as they call them, skills, on Alexa and then,