 All right, good afternoon everybody, my name is Gopan, I work in Amazon in LXI, so my talk today is slide change in pace, I know there is a lot of marketing audience here, but as Mr. Lancher said, the future is technology and I am here to tell you a little bit about the future. So I am going to talk to you a little bit about how in the rank of the officials you need to look at voice security interfaces to really, you know, sort of keep up with technology. So far, how we have interacted with technology really is like this. And we have all these mobile phones, we use computers, laptops, we use remote controls, we control the IC, but this isn't a very human way of communicating. And at the end of the day, it's all about the human connection and it's really all about, it's all about this. If you really looked at it, how we have interacted with personal computing, it's not a place like this, where it also happened in the mid-1970s, and I am going, small little tech lesson jack, our interactions with the personal computing started in 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, sort of like move a file, copy a file, your interaction type, or GOPY, and it wasn't the most of the friendly person. Things changed in the mid-1980s, a little bit, and for the first time we had a graphical use like that. This is something we all take for granted, now we're so used to using. But for the first time we have companies like Microsoft and Apple, and 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. And I'm talking about a computer mouse, which wasn't very popular before that. In the 90s things changed again, and this time we moved towards the era of memory. And I certainly remember the early days of the memory 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 for the browser, and we were introduced to, you know, algorithms like a rock-roll menu, or a radio button. Then again things changed in the mid-2000s. We came into the era of the smartphone. And then this thing was 20 years ago that the mobile phone has been around. We have gone from these really basic phones with small screens and funky 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 swipe right, or how do you zoom a page on your web page? You do that. You have your 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 text wasn't there, but now we have thanks for machine learning, thanks for speech detection, thanks for all of this tech. We're at a stage where we can communicate with a machine using a voice, and they're an intelligent response platform. So, at some point, sometime in mid-2010, there was another planet initiative towards voice use of the computer. We at Amazon, we truly believe that voice represents the next major disruption in computing. And being in marketing, being market leaders, I'm sure you guys have heard this word a lot for its disruption. And it's a new technology, a platform. It changes how we behave, 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 say by 2021, there will be 1.18 billion users who will use voice-based systems. 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? 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 and control your work. So, everything from getting click exposed to playing music, to controlling the smart lights in the house, to setting alarms, to binders, to shopping. Very important to shopping. All of this can be done just via your voice. And for now, how people typically, you have one device at your home, maybe in the ringroom, 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 universities, on the go, at a bank, and at a supermarket. Really, this is our vision that people can use your voice to communicate with machines wherever they go. So, now, you have seen that voice is going to be the next big 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. And here are just some of the global brands that have worked with us to build skills. And this is a very, very fast-going 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 where we can practice with their voice. All right. So, here is what the evolution can apply. For the longest time, people went out of physical stores to buy something. They would, of course, see advertisements. They would see, you know, marketing material on the radio, internet, my thing. 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 through disruption. Of course, that changed again when it came to buying mobile. And I'm sure a lot of people here have worked with e-commerce or worked with companies that like to let people buy it from mobile. That is going to change again with voice. Because how it's started with like this, and these are screenshots from first versions of websites. That's McDonald's, that's BMW, and that's Pepsi. These are first cups of action websites. And see, or at least they all look different. I say so myself. But we're going to go from something like this to something like this, where users are getting ready to go out. They can just say something like I have a bottle of cola to my cart and the device has a bottle of cola and then add it 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 way. And this is a fundamental paradigm shift because so far, what's been happening is brands have worked really hard to sort of maintain visual consistency. Our logo should look like this, but how do you really sort of maintain that in the 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? What can you do to get started with this? What do I do now? I think as a brand, you don't need to start. You need to take stock of the conversations that you're having with your customers right now. Now 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 customers at all. Or maybe some of you are having conversations by our customers or maybe by our chat group. How often do you directly speak to your customers? A lot of the brick and mortar stores, when someone enters a brick and mortar store, you have a person greet your customer which gives a very delightful and surprising experience to that customer. So how do you really take that experience and translate that into the digital world? And I think that is one of the things you as a brand start to think about when you're moving through a voice-centric world. Also, like I said before, I think brands take a lot of effort they spend a lot of time in trying to think of how your brand works. In terms of visual consistency, in how they come across in their colloquial, in their logos, in their advertising. But has anyone really talked about how your brand sounds like? And I think that will be important moving forward. How do 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 customer? Maybe your brand wants to give off a trendy sort of vibe, so maybe you would have a very casual tone. Or maybe your premium brands you have to give your customers slightly different feel. Also, the most important thing I think when it comes to conversation with your face is how authentic and personal can you actually be. I think the big difference between what we've been doing so far in technology with mobile apps and websites and what we're getting into now which are voices and faces is so far, there's not a host of humans to think like computers. We as humans, we shouldn't be thinking in terms of radio buttons, lockdown 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 leads to a lot of personalization and a lot of contextualization that could never have been possible so far. So as a brand, if you have sort of thought of these questions and you're really convinced that voice is that expedient instruction, how do you go about designing voice experience for your customers? How do you really connect with your customers and voice? The 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. You've worked with a lot of brands before who said, hey, you know what, you're really convinced about voice and you want to be there, you want to be the first player there. And the biggest thing between lockdown menus is they take existing experiences from mobile and iMVAC to the voicing. And that could be changed as it works. And the reason is, so far we've been interacting with screen-based devices. Like for me, 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 i. Whereas now in a voice-centered world, we are designing for the yearbook. And that's a fundamental difference again. A good way to start figuring out how you can impact your customer is to try and see where you can fit into your customer's journey. I 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, they can take a work, they use like a smart bulb to turn their lights off. In the afternoon, their kids come back from school, order some food, do some math quizzes, and in the evening, you might get some recipes, so the customers will get their tickets because this is a difficult journey of a consumer who can use voice-use interfaces in certain ways. And as a brand, you can really see where you can advance their life, or where you can really fit into this consumer journey. Once you define sort of what you want to bring and how you want to connect with your customer, this is the most important part, which is sort of deploying the use case that you come up with. And here, the most important thing is to think of the voice design, which is essentially, like I said, how we would actually speak with consumers. Again, the fundamental difference is your design in the years and not the years. This is going to be a smart design that sends your partner. When it comes to design for the eyes, the eye expects you to come. This is why every time you go to Amazon.io, you will see the same elements at the same place every time. That is how we learn to use use 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 of your phone. And what you do is change the location of the app within the location of the app icon. You'll find that the next time you want to use that app, you will go to where it used to be. Because that's how we use visual use interfaces. You train yourself for it to be in that particular place because the eye expects you to come. With the years, it's likely 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 the original sort of thought about their voice experience. And they came up with an Alexa still that could connect with your customer. I'm just going to say that to you. Let's say you have some friends over. 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 the classic. Old fashioned coming right up. Start with the sugar. Add ice. Pour in ice-cream. Stir patiently. Don't wish me the orange zest. Cheers. And for friends that don't know what they want, it could be even quite something for them. Would you like something sweet or sour? Sweet. Looks like you're in a mood for a personal party. Just mix. Shake. Twist. Strain. Heel. Play. And serve. Who? I mean you, Mr. Bartender. Just say Alexa, open the bar and start making cocktails. Alexa, I feel like a Vodka Martini. Do you like that shake or stir? Here I can really want to connect with your customer. They come up having a skill that can help their customers with cocktails to really reinforce the brand and guide and reinforce what users want to connect with the brand. So they built up this pretty complex ingredient and 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 your customers and they designed this. And it's really successful as well in terms of how users are connecting to this skill in this voice and the world. Alright, 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 your voice. And I think this is also very important and gets moving. 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 strategy. 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 U.S. with 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 bank and skill on Alexa so that our customers can ask for clients, they can transfer money and ask for market information and stuff like that on the skill. And they put in a lot of design effort, they put in a lot of stack effort and they launch the skill. And it was a good skill, it worked really well. But the one thing that they saw when the users were using the skill is that most people actually didn't ask for what's the interest rate on this or what's the loan rate, etc. The most commonly asked question was how am I doing it? Because that's such a human question to ask of financial institutions because people just wanted to know if they were financially working, if their financial health was okay. And that was something that they didn't see coming and we didn't see coming either but they were learning from us, they had to go back and dream of this skill. They sort of, they optimized the skills to make it a lot more human to have that certain connection to be a customer. And right now it's one of the most popular skills in the U.S. We do that still often to figure out what financial health is. So really think about 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 U.S. They do a lot of podcasts, they do a lot of vocal 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 it to the case study. When they take to shots, how quick is it when? Why don't they eat? Kids can be easily distracted. So the parents getting them to brush their teeth can feel more like holy teeth. Only 47% are seating in the mornings and 69% at night. But ignoring crushes has consequences. Tooth decay has become the most common chronic disease among young children. Success kids dreamt of a way where parents make tooth time a journey of imagination with a simple 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. So, which of these animals has the most teeth? A snail? A shark? Or a super toothed titan? 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-pass, so they brush better things, 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 night time brushing to 89%. And a whopping 91% of parents credited Chompers with making brushing easier. It's unanimous. Chompers is a game changer. It's amazing what kids can accomplish in just two minutes, twice a decade. Three, two, one, sit! Next example, because the brand test could easily have just, hey, let's throw some advertising stuff in our skillset. Kids don't get to do so, and they could have done that. But they really chose to embrace the medium. They figured out what the strength of the medium was, how to engage with children on that medium, and they came onto this. The problem statement was pretty simple. They wanted questions, wanted to encourage kids to brush more. The problem was kids liked screen-based devices, but most bathrooms or restaurants and houses didn't have screen-based devices. And kids didn't listen to podcasts. How many kids do you know? Actually, it's in the podcast. So the medium actually worked with me. I'm not even able to stress to come up with this, where they actually came up with this skillet. And I like the second point that's mentioned here, which is, it outlines the shifts in search. In the future, I don't know how often we'll be going back to our laptops and mobile phones to actually search for information. And I think that is where you really, really need a strong brand presence. Because I'm going to ask Alexa, say, Alexa, what color should I buy? If you're perhaps, say, you want to be that first research, something online in a search engine, I can see 10 results and I can talk with you for a month. But when that shift sort of moves to voice, you sort of want to be that first research. And I think that's what really important is, that's what is really important. Needless to say, this campaign did really well. It's one like the Khan Lai, kids reported more brushing and everything. But what I really want to highlight is how they sort of embrace the medium and the technology to a good extent. There's a famous quote by Gartner for his research, especially in technology. And they say that conversational platforms will try the next big paradigm shift in how human practice is still working. I think 10 years ago, if I was given a stop and I said, hey, keyboard and mouse won't be the primary user interface anymore. I had a problem and it's been laughed at. And trust me, 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 out and do companies and brands and say, hey, 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 are at that phase right now in that shift towards voice interfaces. And it might not happen tomorrow or two weeks from now, but it's definitely going to happen. And we would have probably seen this image quite a bit in the front of the bottom there. It's called the March Progress. It sort of outlines how we have evolved from being able to stand on a repeat to being able to master machines. We see the end points as us being able to talk and do the adherence and intelligent response back up. 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 customers a voice. Because this is definitely going to be in the future. Thanks a lot for that.