NEXT 2019 Pre-Conference Series - Stuart Crane & Paul Cornwell - Voice Metrics

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 Stuart Crane, Founder and CEO of Voice Metrics; and Paul Cornwell, CTO of Voice Metrics. Find Stuart and Paul Online: Stuart's LinkedIn Paul's Linkedin Website: www.voicemetrics.io [00:00] Hi, I'm Jamin Brazil, and you're listening to the Happy Market Research podcast. This is a special episode that's connected to the upcoming Insights Association’s NEXT conference. It is located in Chicago on June 13th and 14th. I do a lot of these conferences both inside and adjacent to the market research industry. I think this particular NEXT conference is a must attend if you're interested in learning about what's coming up “next”. Maybe that's how they came up with the name. My guests today are Stuart Crane, the founder and CEO of Voice Metrics, which helps companies leverage voice, as well as Paul Cornwell. Did I say your last name right, Paul? [00:48] Yeah, you got it. [00:49] Voice metrics CTO. Guys, thanks very much for joining me on the Happy Market Research podcast today! [00:53] –Glad to be here. –Yes, thanks for having us, Jamin! [00:56] You guys are speaking at the NEXT conference on how to integrate voice into the total customer experience. I'm really curious, given your backgrounds, when did you first recognize the voice was important? [01:10] Voice, I've been interested in for quite some time back in the day when I would listen to cassettes in the car and CDs in the car. I was really interesting in voice recognition:  recognizing voice with Dragon dictate, and that sort of thing. But when I realized it was really going to be big is actually when I got an Amazon Echo, I think was for Christmas in 2015, I believe, and just being able to talk to this cylinder, and have it talk back to you and start songs, and you could still talk to it while music is playing. And obviously Siri was out there. But now, it's basically an ambient voice conversation. It just blew my mind! And then I found out that you can actually write software for it. You can write programs for the Amazon Echo. Back then, it was just called Echo. Now it's obviously “Alexa”, and it's a big ecosystem and everything. So I just really recognized that being able to talk to devices and have the full features of computers behind it really is going to transform things. Not that it's going to take away the capabilities of mobile or anything like that, but supplement it in such a great way. I started looking at ways that we could program voice and got involved very early in the Alexa’s software development ecosystem and just took it from there. [02:29] All right, great. So Paul? [02:31] Yeah. So I came from an AI machine learning background prior to getting into voice, and that was sort of my segue-way into voice and where the interest came from. So actually, before I met Stuart,