 Hi, this is your host Soplin Bhartya and my next guest is John Stein, Executive Director of Open Voice Network. It's a Linux Foundation project. John, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you, appreciate it. First of all, tell us a bit about this Open Voice Network. What is the project all about? It's about, you know, you can take from several perspectives. From one perspective, it's about standards and ethical use guidelines for voice assistance. From another perspective, it's about the future of voice assistance. It being open, it being a level playing field, it being worthy of user trust. So standards, ethical use guidelines, as a means to achieving those objectives, which I said there in the second point. Can you talk a bit about the origin of the network and why you decided to work with the Linux Foundation? The origin story starts in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2016. I was with Intel, we had colleagues from MIT, people I knew, conversations with folks at Capgemini Consulting. And we raised the question, what technology is going to most reshape the consumer to enterprise landscape for the next 10 to 15 years? And you could list out all the technologies du jour at that time, IOT, AR, VR, of course, AIML, et cetera, et cetera. And we centered on voice in that conversation that led to research papers, that led to presentations, that led to conversations with leading enterprises who said, and agreed, this voice phenomenon, however it comes out, is going to be very important to us as enterprises. The way data is handled, the way we connect with consumers, the overall potential standardization of this, what steps might we take that gathered some initial enterprise level contributors, advocates, individuals who said, this is important to do. We began to meet informally and then on a regular basis and in the process there, Swapnil, we began then and met leaders from the Linux Foundation, looked at each other and said, there's a tremendous opportunity here on both sides. When it comes to Linux Foundation, I look at the Foundation does a couple of things, but mostly it's about software. It is also about standards and specifications. So when we look at Open Voice Network, what is the scope of this project or this foundation? Three things. Number one is the development proposal of technical standards that would make a voice accessible, inclusive, data protected, interoperable, a critical element. So technical standards and development of those and proposals to both organizations such as IEEE W3C and the like, and potentially some things that we do on our own. A second is the advocacy of voice in the enterprise and where is voice creating value? Where does voice lead to business creation, value creation for the enterprise? Third, a set of guidelines, if you will, ethical use guidelines for consumers, you know, centering around consumers, I should say, but also for the enterprise. How do you use voice? And especially the question of what do you do with the remarkable depth and breadth of voice data? Since it's the new project, new foundation, can you talk about who are the members who are involved with these projects? We have, gosh, 150 to 160 monthly active practitioners and volunteers, but supporting this work financially and also through the active senior leaders from these companies are six founding sponsors, Target Corporation, Schwartz Group, the leading retailer in Europe, and many people in this would know them from their brand little LIDL. Waitman's Food Markets, Microsoft, just a little technology company up there in Redmond, Deutsche Telekom, and then Veritone, a wonderful AI firm based in Southern California. These are the founding sponsors of the Open Voice Network and they contribute both financially to help push forward this work as well as in just the direct contributions of technology and business leaders from these six companies. When we look at the voice space, you know, the big player, the biggest player, of course, is Amazon with their Alexa. There's a big ecosystem there, Apple is big, you know, with the Siri, of course, Google does a lot of work there. These players are kind of missing in the members, so do you have plans to get them involved? Because these players are involved with a lot of Linux Foundation projects already. Swap and others, no question, they are very involved with Linux Foundation projects and I would venture to say that they're very well aware of the Open Voice Network because we've been in conversation with the leaders within voice. Maybe it's not the right time to join, maybe they're looking for us to grow further, but again, we are in conversation with the leaders in the voice community and again, and we applaud their work toward interoperability and openness, Amazon with their voice interoperability initiative. Bravo, that's great. They have a perspective of interoperability that's more hardware centric. We have one that is software centric, the two come together. So again, we're trying to be very open and outreaching to many. This will grow over time and we will welcome their participation. Linux Foundation has a very well-established kind of structure for its projects, but projects have their own freedom. They can have their own governance. Linux Foundation provides them with a lot of resources. So can you talk about the governance structure of Open Voice Network? Yeah, independently, great question. Independently governed, independently funded. We have a steering committee comprised of representatives from our sponsoring companies. Then we have technical working groups that are addressing some of the major issues. Three of those right now, one on privacy and security, one on interoperability, or really a software-defined interoperability, a third on a potential idea of a destination registry, a DNS for voice, or a voice registry service. We also have then a number of communities focused on the value of voice and the potential for standards creating value and voice in such things as retail, K through 12 education, a group taking a look at ethical use issues and the like. That's how we come together and how we do our work. Our steering committee or our board meets on a monthly basis and they are responsible for all the things boards do, budgets, strategic direction, guidance and the like. When we look at voice space, what are the challenges that you see as I was mentioning earlier? It's not just about understanding the natural language processing is one big piece. Privacy is a big piece because what when you talk about, you know, you are listening to everything that we are saying, we have really, we have to just take the words of company, hey, we are not recording everything, we do know that recording, we don't know how much they're storing literally. So if you look at voice space, what are the big challenges that you plan to tackle, which I feel go beyond just making it more democratic, making it more accessible to companies so that they can leverage it? I think there's probably four things that are very high on the list. The first is just making privacy workable, feasible, accessible. And privacy is about a number of things, but it's about transparency, it's about consent. It's about understanding what you are giving away or giving agreement to. So transparency, consent and all that makes privacy a useful tool and an important thing for consumers. A second swap note is critically important to the entire enterprise world, whether it's in retail, healthcare, media entertainment, financial services, you name it, and that is the privacy of commercial data. If we have a conversation between a user and an enterprise, does the platform providing that connection have the right to that data? Or should that commercial data really be the realm of the user and the enterprise? It's a significant issue and one that has not yet been fully either addressed nor resolved, certainly not resolved. A third is interoperability between conversational agents, between voice assistants. Should not, if I am using Google Home, should I not be able to talk to Alexa and or Bixby and or Siri and or that from a Raza or Soundhound or any of the great independent companies? And then fourth, it's about finding, being found and finding. How do you find a voice agent? How do you find a conversational agent? You might go online and search here from Amazon, here from Google. But is there a way, could there be, should there be a global, neutral, non-profit destination registry, voice registry for voice, where you as a user have a unique identifier, no one can copy it, no one can take it away, much like a URL and where you can be found and where users have the confidence of finding you and only you? Some of the member companies are also European and when you look at Europe, the privacy there is way ahead of what we have here. GDPR is a great example there. So how do you kind of plan to tackle this challenge? Because also a lot of companies that we talk about some are based in the US so it becomes even more complicated when it comes to voice. We do it in several ways. One is just through our European partners and sponsors. Team leaders and team members of those companies keeping us surprised of what's happening in Brussels, what are the latest things in legislative and regulatory issues. And as an example for that, the European Data Protection Board recently published a very detailed report on the application of GDPR to voice assistance. And we were one of the number of organizations that responded to that and said, here's what we should also be thinking about. This is great. Think about this. And so it is through working with our sponsors and then our many connections within Europe. Again, this is a global effort, starts with Europe and the States. But Swapna, we also should mention we have a formal working relationship with the China Netcasting Services Association. They're the formal organization government supported that is the overarching group that also takes in is involved with voice assistance in China. And we're sharing information with that group. So a global effort, but to your question, keeping a prize of what's happening in Brussels, working with our partners, and then actively participating. John, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about Open Voice Network, how you're working with the Linux Foundation, and also actually going deeper than that and talk about the challenges that are there in the voice space, because what I feel and I'm sure the whole community agrees with that, that voice is going to become an interface to interact with computers because it's so easy. Though I also like the visual interface as well where you can see, but that is the ultimate destination. Typing is kind of becoming, so 1870s, 60s, 50s, depending on how old one is. So thanks for sharing that. And I would love to have you back on the show to talk about as the progress is made at the Project and Foundation. Thank you. I would love to do that. It'd be my pleasure. Thank you so much.