 Moving further to our next session which is presented by Mr. Soham Maheshwar, Alexa, evangelist at Amazon India, his role involves inspiring and helping developers build incredible voice experiences using Alexa. He was a part of the Alexa launch in India which has seen developers build over 20,000 skills in a short span of time. The topic of address is giving a voice to your brand. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome Mr. Maheshwar on stage. Check, check. All right, good afternoon everybody. My name is Soham. I work in Amazon as an Alexa evangelist. So my talk today is a slight change of pace. I know there's a large marketing audience here but as Mr. Sudhanshu said, the future is technology and I'm here to tell you a little bit about the future. So I'm here to talk to you a little bit about how brands and businesses need to look at voice user interfaces to really, you know, sort of keep up with technology. So far, how we have interacted with technology really looks like this. We've all used mobile phones. We've used computers, laptops. We've used remote controls. We've controlled IAC. But this isn't a very human way of communicating. At the end of the day, it's all about the human connection and it really all about, it's all about this. If you really look at it, how we have interacted with personal computing, it sort of looks like this where it all started in the mid-1970s and I'm going, small little tech lesson here. Our interactions with personal computing started in the mid-1970s and it was then, you know, people use very, very basic computers, small black and white screens and you could only enter text-based commands to get something done. So to like move a file or to copy a file, you had to actually type out COPY and it wasn't the most user-friendly, of course. Things changed in the mid-1980s a little bit and for the first time we had graphical user interfaces. This is something we all take for granted now. We're so used to using, but for the first time, you know, companies like Microsoft and Apple and Xerox, they came up with interfaces that were visual in nature. For the first time, you could see a file on your system or you could move this little piece of hardware that would translate onto the screen. I'm talking about a computer mouse, which, you know, wasn't very popular before that. In the 90s, things changed again and this time we moved towards the era of the web and I certainly remember the early days of the web where I used Internet Explorer and we had to wait like five minutes for a static website to load up and for the first time, of course, we had to use this thing called a browser and we were introduced to, you know, elements like a drop-down menu or a radio button. Then again, things changed in the mid-2000s. We came to the era of the smartphone and just think of the 20 years or so that the mobile phone has been around. We've gone from these really basic phones with small screens and clunky keypads to the advanced smartphones that all of us here have in our pockets and think of the interactions you have on your phones today. You know, you swipe right or how do you zoom a page on your web page? You do that. Yeah, you pinch to zoom or you pull to refresh. All these interactions didn't exist before but as technology evolves, so does our interactions with it. Now, like I said in the earlier slide, you know, it's all about the human interaction and we as humans, we've been using our voice to communicate with each other for over 100,000 years. But for some reason, our technology really hasn't reflected that up until now. In a nutshell, it simply wasn't easy. The tech wasn't there, but now, you know, thanks to machine learning, thanks to speech-to-text recognition, thanks to all of this tech, we are at a stage where we can communicate with the machine using our voice and hear an intelligent response back. So as if on time, sometime in the mid-2010s, there was another paradigm shift towards voice user interfaces. We at Amazon, we truly believe that voice represents the next major disruption in computing. And being in marketing, being marketeers, I'm sure you guys have heard this word a lot, which is disruption. And it's when a new technology or a platform, it changes how we behave or it changes how we operate. And we believe that voice is that next disruption in computing. It's not just us. You know, if you look at the statistics as well, they're saying by 2021, there will be 1.83 billion users who would use voice-based assistance. And that really changes the paradigm. It changes the paradigm of information lookup. It changes the paradigm of how brands communicate with customers. So it's really going to change the paradigm in the years to come. Keeping this disruption in mind, we came up with this device called the Echo. Does anyone here own one? Anybody? Awesome, a few of y'all. So this is a device called the Amazon Echo. It's powered by Alexa, of course. And this is a device that lets you voice control your world. So everything from getting cricket scores to playing music to controlling the smart lights in your house to setting alarms, reminders to shopping, very importantly to shopping, all of this can be done just via your voice. And for now how people typically use it is, you know, you'd have one device at your home, maybe in the living room, maybe in the bedroom, but really our vision is not just that. Our vision is really for Alexa to be everywhere, which means you will be using your voice to communicate with machines not just at home, but also at work, at university, on the go, at your bank, and at the supermarket. Really this is our vision where people can use their voice to communicate with machines wherever they go. So now you've seen that voice is going to be the next major disruption. So let's take a look at how brands and businesses really should start thinking about voice. On Alexa, of course, you have something called a skill. Similar to how you have apps on your phone or how you have websites, you have something called a skill on Alexa. These are just some of the global brands that have worked with us to build skills. And this is a very, very fast-growing ecosystem. It's something that's about to explode right now. And we really hope that brands and businesses come and start building skills to really interact with their audience. All right, so if you really look at the evolution of buying, for the longest time, people went out to physical stores to buy something. Of course, see advertisements. They would see marketing material on radio, internet, magazine, wherever. But for the longest time, they had to go to a physical store to actually buy something. That, of course, changed with the internet. And I think Amazon was one of the pioneers of e-commerce where for the first time you could sit in your house and actually buy something and have it delivered home. True disruption. Of course, that changed again when it came to buying via mobile phone. And I'm sure a lot of you here e-commerce or work with companies that, you know, let people buy from a mobile phone. That is going to change again with voice. Because how it started was like this, and these are screenshots from first versions of websites. That's McDonald's, that's BMW, and that's the Pepsi. These are first cuts of actual websites. And see how horrendous they all looked if I say so myself. But we're going to go from something like this to something like this, where a user's getting ready to go out. They can just say something like, Alexa, add a bottle of cola to my cart and the device says bottle of cola has been added to your cart. What this really means is for the first time you need to think of the essence of your brand in a voice-centric world. And this is a fundamental paradigm shift because so far what's been happening is brands have worked really hard to sort of maintain like say visual consistency, you know, our logo should look like this, our lateral should look like this. But how do you really sort of maintain that in a voice-centric world? Because for the first time your brand has a voice in the digital world. And this is, I think, very, very important. Your brand has a voice in the digital world for the first time. So as a brand, how do you really start thinking about this paradigm? You know, what can you do to get started into this? You're like, okay, what do I do now? I think as a brand you really need to start, you need to take stock of the conversations that you're having with your customer right now. You know, what are those conversations? What do they sound like? For a lot of brands that were born in the digital age, maybe you're not having any conversation with your customer at all. All your interactions are completely technologically driven. Or maybe some of y'all are having conversations via a customer support agent. Or maybe via a chat bot. How often do you directly speak to your customer? A lot of the brick and mortar stores when someone enters a brick and mortar store, you have a person greet the customer which gives a very delightful and surprising experience to that customer. So how do you really take that experience and translate that to the digital world? And I think that is some of the things you as a brand start to need to think about when you're moving to a voice-centric world. Also, like I said before, you know, I think brands take a lot of effort, they spend a lot of time in trying to think of how their brand looks, you know, in terms of visual consistency and how they come across in their collateral and their logos, in their advertisements. But has anyone really thought about how your brand sounds like? And I think that will be important moving forward. You know, how will you really give a voice to your brand? Is it a male voice? Is it a female voice? What sort of tone can you actually use when you're communicating with your customers? Maybe your brand wants to give off this friendly, youthful sort of vibe, so maybe you give it a very casual tone. Or maybe you're a premium brand, so you have to give your tone a slightly different feel. Also, the most important thing I think when it comes to conversational interfaces is how authentic and personal can you actually be? I think the big difference between what we've been doing so far in technology, you know, with mobile apps and websites, and what we're getting into now, which are voice user interfaces, is so far we have sort of forced humans to think like computers. We, as humans, we shouldn't be thinking in terms of radio buttons, drop-down menus, and swipe right and swipe left. But now we're finally at a stage where we're forcing computers to think like humans. And again, I think that's what's really changing the paradigm. And that lends to a lot of personalization and a lot of contextualization that could never have been possible so far with what we have. All right, so as a brand, if you have sort of thought of these questions and if you're, you know, you're really convinced that voice is that next major disruption, how do you go about designing a voice experience for your customer? How do you really connect with your customers via voice? A good way to get started is, of course, to define how you can actually enhance your customer's life. And I think this is the most important thing. We've worked with a lot of brands before who said, hey, you know what, I'm really convinced about voice. I really want to be there. I want to be the first player there. And the big mistake I think lots of them do are existing experiences from mobile and web to the voice world. And that typically doesn't work. And the reason is so far we have been interacting with screen-based devices. We use a laptop, we use a desktop, we use a mobile phone. All these devices are screen-based devices which are meant for the eye, whereas now in a voice-centric world you're designing for the year. And that's a fundamental difference again. You know, figuring out how you can impact your customer is try and see where you can fit into your customer's journey. Think of maybe a day in the life of your customer. Maybe your customer listens to the news in the morning. They take an Uber later in the day to work. They use like a smart bulb to turn the lights off. In the afternoon, their kids come back from school, order some food, do some math quizzes. And in the evening, you know, you might get some recipes, listen to Sadguru, get the cricket scores. This is the typical journey of a consumer who can use voice user interfaces in certain ways. And as a brand, you can really see where you can enhance their life or where you can really fit in to this consumer journey. Once you've defined sort of what you want to build and how you want to connect with your customer comes the most important part which is sort of deploying the use case that you've come up with. And here, the most important thing is to think of the voice design which is essentially, like I said, how you would actually speak with your consumer. Again, the fundamental difference is you're designing for the years and not the eyes. I'm just going to give you a small design lesson here, but when it comes to designing for the eyes, the eye expects uniformity. This is why every time you go to Amazon.io, you will see the same elements of the time that is how we learn to use user interfaces. If you don't believe me, let's try an experiment. You can take out your phone, think of the app that you use the most on your phone. And what you do is change the location of that app within, change the location of the app icon. You'll find that the next time you want to go use that app, you will go to where it used to be because that's how we use visual user interfaces. You train yourself for it to be at that particular place with uniformity. With the year, though it's slightly different, the year wants a lot of variety. You don't want to hear the same thing over and over again. So keep that in mind when actually designing the conversation between your voice experience and your customer. I just want to show you like a small video clip of how Diageo sort of thought about their voice experience and they came up with an Alexa skill that could connect with your customers. So I'm just going to play and say you have some friends over. And to shake things up just say Alexa, open the bar. Welcome to the bar. It's like a personal bartender except you don't need to tip. Let's start with a classic. Old fashion coming right up. Start with the sugar. Add ice. Pour in the whiskey. Stir patiently. Garnish with the orange zest. Cheers. And for friends that don't know what they want would you like something sweet or sour? Sweet. Looks like you're in the mood for a cosmopolitan. Just mix, shake, twist, strain, peel, flame and serve. Boom, look at you Mr. Bartender. Just say Alexa, open the bar to start making cocktails. Alexa, I feel like a vodka martini. Do you like that shaken or stirred? So Diageo really want to connect with their customers and they thought that having a skill that would help their customers build cocktails would really reinforce the brand's guidelines, reinforce what users wanted to connect with the brand. So they built out this particular experience with sort of mirrored like how you'd go to your local bar down the road and ask your favorite bartender for a cocktail. And they did a lot of research into how they could actually connect with their customers and they designed this. And it's really successful as well in terms of how users are connecting with this skill in this voice centric world. All right, so we spoke about how you could define what your voice experience could be and how you could actually design it. The most important part after designing and developing it is to actually optimize for voice. And I think this also is very important and gets overlooked because again, I think fundamentally the difference here is with voice there are different ways of saying the same thing. So that is a huge technological and a design challenge. And you really sort of want to listen to what your customers are saying to your skill. I want to give you a good example and it's a great anecdote. So in the US, this financial institution called Capital One they spend a lot of time and a lot of research saying hey, we want to be the first financial institution to build a banking skill on Alexa so that our customers can ask for account balance, they can transfer money and ask for mortgage information like that on the skill. And they put in a lot of design effort, they put in a lot of tech effort and they launched the skill. It was a good skill, it worked really well. But the one thing that they saw when the users were using this skill is that most people actually didn't ask for hey, what's the interest rate on this or what's the loan rate etc. The most commonly asked question was how am I doing? Because that's such a human question to ask a financial institution because people just wanted to know if they were financially okay, if their financial health was okay. And that was something that they didn't see coming and we didn't see coming either but it was a learning for us so they had to go back and rework this skill to sort of, they optimized their skill to make it a lot more human to have that certain connection with their customers. And right now it's one of the most popular skills in the US where people use that skill often to figure out what the financial health is. So really think of how you can optimize this experience for your users. I want to share a quick case study with you. It's a case study called Chompers and it was done by Gimlet Media. They're a pretty popular company in the US. They do a lot of podcasts and they do a lot of work on voice. So they were tasked with creating something for kids. And I'm going to show you a small video again and I'll take you through the case study. Now I'm going to teach the shocks out. How big is a whale? What do plants eat? Kids can be easily distracted so for parents getting them to brush their teeth can feel more like polling teeth. Only 47% succeeding in the mornings and 69% at night. But ignoring brushing has consequences. Tooth decay has become the most common chronic disease among young children. So Crest Kids dreamt up a way for parents to make Tooth Time a journey of imagination and full voice command. Alexa, start Chompers. Chompers is a twice daily audio show that combines healthy brushing tips and curiosity inspiring content that keeps kids engaged while they build better brushing habits. Each episode runs for at least two minutes. The exact time dentists recommend for healthy brushing. Switch to the other side of the bottom of your mouth and keep brushing. So which of these animals has the most teeth? A snail? A sharp? Or a saber tooth tiger? We'll tell you tonight when you come back for more Chompers. To make it easy for parents Crest Kids integrated Chompers with Amazon's Alexa empowering moms and dads to instantly unlock a world of original songs, jokes, stories, riddles and facts. Keeping kids entertained and on task so they brush better daily, morning and night. Tonight, we're going to give you the answer to that question we gave you this morning. Which animal has the most teeth? The answer is a snail has the most teeth. New content every morning and night drove a behavioral shift for Chompers listeners boosting morning brushing to 73% and nighttime brushing to 89%. And a whopping 91% of parents credited Chompers for brushing easier. It's unanimous. Chompers is a game changer. It's amazing what kids can accomplish in just two minutes, twice a day. I really like this example because I think the brand crest could easily have just said, hey, let's throw some advertising stuff in our skill, say, please brush your teeth kids, don't forget to do so. And they could have left it at that. They really chose to embrace the medium. They figured out what the strengths of the medium was, how to engage with children on that medium and they came out with this. The problem statement was pretty simple. Crest kids wanted to encourage kids to brush more. The problem was kids like screen-based devices but most bathrooms or restrooms and houses didn't have screen-based devices. And kids didn't listen to podcasts. How many kids actually listen to podcasts? So Gimlet Media actually worked with the Amazon team and they worked with Crest to come up with this where they actually came up with this skill. And I like the second point that's mentioned here, which is it outlined the shift in search. In the future, I don't know how often we'll be going back to our laptops and our mobile phone to actually search for information. And I think that is where you really, really need a strong brand presence because if I'm going to ask Alexa saying, Alexa, what cola should I buy? If you're Pepsi or your Coke, you want to be that first results there. Right now, if I look up something online on a search engine, I can see 10 results and I can probably pick from one but when that shift sort of moves to voice, you sort of want to be at that first search. And I think that's what really important is. That's what is really important. And needless to say, this campaign did really well. It won like a Khan Lion. Kids reported more brushing and everyone was happy. But what I really want to highlight is how they sort of embrace the medium and the technology to good effect. There's a famous quote by Gartner. Gartner is a company that does a lot of industry research, especially in technology. And they say that conversational platforms will drive the next big paradigm shift in how we humans interact with the digital world. I think 10 years ago if I was giving you the stock and I said keyboard and mouse won't be the primary user interface anymore, I would have probably been laughed at. And trust me, I started, I worked in tech for a bit, so I started my career as a mobile app developer and we would start up and we'd go often to companies and brands saying you really need a mobile app and they'd be like stop it. I have a website, I'm cool. But then of course we know what happened. I think we're at that phase right now in that shift towards voice interfaces. It might not happen tomorrow or two weeks from now, but it is definitely going to happen. And you would have probably seen this image quite a bit, the one at the bottom there. It's called the March of Progress. It sort of outlines how we have evolved from Ape to being able to stand on our two feet to being able to master machines. We see the endpoint as us being able to talk into the ether and hearing an intelligent response back. And this is really where we see the future of technology and that's why we really think brands and businesses have to be here and they have to adapt to this new technology in the future. I just want to end by saying think about how you can give your brand or your business a voice because this is definitely going to be the future. Thanks a lot for that. Lovely audience, thank you.