 Everyone having fun? How is it day two of Slush? What an amazing event. It's like my favorite event of the year. It's really the most fun tech event I go to. Well, we have the pleasure of having two really, really interesting companies and guests here to talk about one of my favorite topics, voice technology and applications. Who here has used a voice technology of some sort? Wow, it really is 2018. You know, 20 years ago, I don't think we'd see these number of hands. And speaking of 20 years ago, you know, in a previous life, I was working in the space. We were doing natural language processing and voice recognition. I was working at Microsoft at the time, the other big tech company in Seattle. And they were doing really amazing work at the time. And I just remember it was really hard. You know, I remember when Dragon speak, I think that was one of the voice recognition programs that were coming out in the 80s and 90s. And this stuff was just really hard to do from a development perspective. A lot of it didn't really work that well. And it just took a while. And it just seems like in 2006 or something like that, computers like woke up, not to scare you, but it just started working all of a sudden. Now, you know, literally, I should have asked how many people have not used a voice technology. And that would have been more telling, maybe. But here we are in 2018. We have these products all over in our houses and our cars and our phone. And it seems ubiquitous. And so why don't we start by talking more about what, you know, a little bit more of your background and what you're doing and your role that you see in this voice technology space. Sure. So maybe Rodrigo will start with you. Yeah, yeah, happy to. Thank you. Thanks everyone for coming. And I see that this is a round stage. You don't have eight microphones around and no wake words here, but very Alexa-like. I like it. So I'm one of the partners of the Alexa fund. We're a three person team plus great support from the rest of the Alexa organization to invest $200 million that we have a commitment from the company to invest in startups across all stages of growth. We have run two accelerator classes to really work with really early stage companies. We've done much bigger investments in more mature companies. And we're really enjoying working with entrepreneurs from around the world that are building with voice technology. And so we've made 60 investments to date and excited to have this conversation today to tell you guys a little bit more and all of you what some of the fun things that we're doing, but also I think great opportunities and even still more challenges that remain in voice technology. Very good. So you really have this platform and now the fun is growing. What an amazing story. We're gonna talk a lot more about that. Omri, you've got a very interesting application and it looks like you're wearing the product right now. Tell us more about the product, the company, the product and what you're doing. Yeah. So I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Vee. Vee in very short is a voice and AI based personal trainer. We basically took the world's best human trainers in the world. If you want to lose weight, run your 5k pretty soon to do your mindfulness session and more and basically downloaded the human mimics and human practices to create an entity called Vee that is using voice as the main medium including music and some other cool audio stuff. And what you see over here is one of our utilities, if you will. It's one of the devices that we use together with Harman Cardone can get your heart rate, your voice recognition, your motion and more and you can meet Vee. There is an app on your phone with no device needed and also by one of our devices so you can get a full hardware and software experience. I see. So it's an AI fitness coach in your ear. Exactly. So you've got speakers at home and various places that you put an Alexa enabled Amazon product and then you've got now speakers in your ear. Interesting. We've got to have the sound come somewhere, right? So that's really interesting. We've got a platform and an example of an application of voice technology. Both sound incredibly useful. But I'm going to play the role of a bit of a skeptic because I'm going to just so we're at slush so we can be open here. I have to be honest with you. I have these smart speakers at home and I use it to play baby shark for my baby son and he loves it. He actually can say play baby shark and it starts playing and he loves it. He starts dancing around. It's great. But surely there's more to it than that, right? Are people really using this a lot or is it a gimmick? I don't know. Certainly not gimmick. It's on the front page of Amazon.com all the time. But what can you talk about in terms of the progress that you guys are making? Yeah. So I think we obviously started with some really simple and easy to use applications that got people really engaged with Alexa. In fact, when Alexa first came out and even before the Alexa fund was formed, Alexa was just a set of skills that the device could do that no outside developers could build on top of yet. We needed to first build the trust with the customer and find out the ways that customers were going to use Alexa in their homes and then build from there. But you're right, like using plain music and using timers is some of the most basic, most popular things. The number of questions, though, that people ask Alexa, you'd be astounded by the information knowledge that Alexa has to constantly ingest to be a ready to be helpful assistant in the home. And you can imagine that the trust grows when Alexa can say, hey, I know the answer to that question. Here it is. She doesn't respond exactly that way. But the more she responds that way as opposed to, hmm, I don't know the answer to that. Each incremental improvement that we make on that gets people engaged experimenting with new things they can do with Alexa. There's also tens of millions of households that have connected at least one extra device to Alexa. We feature on our website either Amazon devices or other outside company devices that link to Alexa and work with Alexa. And a lot of people have taken the step to build that next link to a device that then enables some new interaction. So a lot of connectivity you're creating here. And making that connectivity is another piece that extends that utility beyond just plain music or plain, you know, putting timers on. So how many, how often are they used? I don't know what you can share. But like how, you know, I feel like I don't really use my device that much. It's probably because I don't know about what I can get it to do. Yeah, I can't speak about the specific ways. And it's also very different skills and different interactions get used at different frequencies, you can imagine. But again, tens of millions of people are using this in their daily lives. And and that number continues to grow and continues to grow with also with the number of people using it around the world, what languages around the world. Okay. Yeah, so we're, we're now active, I think fully deployed for what we call general availability in 11 or so countries. But the language is beyond English include now Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and and then we have also Canadian French and and the UK. So no Chinese. Okay. Yeah. No finish. No finish. All right. But then the rest in the rest of the world, the countries that are are you're able to use you're able to use Alexa in English mode in what we call a rest of world mode around the world. Does it understand accents like if for non native speakers? It gets better at understanding accent. Yeah, she gets better at understanding accents. But I'm sure that there's places where a heavy non English English speaker right now non English accent might have sometimes trouble getting getting understood by Alexa. Got it. Well, we're going to come back to that. I got a zillion questions. But I want to hear about your made such a unique product because you you're selling headphones. Yeah. That sounds like a hard business, man. So for us, we are absolutely not a headphone or a hardware business. We are AI software subscription business. One of the options you can get is buying a device on our side, but it's just to ease the work on you to get out of the box, premium audio device. But the core for audience is application base. People are downloading on app store or play store the app and they get to their first journey with V. And to build on what was mentioned about Alexa for us as well, we needed to laser focused about use cases that will bring significant added value. So basically anything that he'd hands free eyes free, voice is a very powerful experience in fitness case, that you can literally have a fully conversational experience without the need to look at a screen or to tap any button. Number one. And number two, a very immersive intimate experience, if you will. You guys probably saw hair and some other beautiful movies that inspired teams like ours to take this broad vision and laser focus on a specific use case that is classic for a voice experience. That's I mean, I'll be completely honest with you, like it sounds like it could be kind of distracting actually if I have a voice coach telling me stuff while exercising sometimes when I go work out, go for a run or something. I just want some quiet Zen like experience like what? I mean, yeah, so tell me about that. So you're right and exactly put aside we're not here about technology and about making some cool features and the edgy gadgets. What we did is looked at the human case and ask us what would the best human trainer would do and what a thoughtful person would do is ask you questions and listen. So we try to listen more than talk. And we try to understand and cluster the type of user in terms of your user type, your level. We ask you questions about verbosity. Do you want me to talk more or less? We play music most of the time just if you'll have fun and you'll be within your groove and do your thing. And we're trying to mimic a thoughtful human interaction just using a voice. Now, does it work? Do I have to buy your headphones or can I use my own and their nice headphones? Harbin and Kardon can't argue with that. You know, it's probably really good sound, but it looks kind of expensive. So yeah, I welcome you guys to go to vtrainer.com. You can buy our headsets on Amazon or on our.com. These are the two only channels we are focused on for e-commerce or a download the app, go to a free trial. You don't need to pay anything and then upsell to either a subscription or a device part. Okay. Any special discounts for a slush people? Yeah, so I promised the guys I'm not talking about it, but we kept a promise for you guys to any person within a Finland IP will get a 30% discount if you're going into the site. All right. 30% off. It sounds pretty good. Still sounds like a hard business selling headphones, but it makes sense that if you're a fitness coach, but why would you build your own fitness, I mean, can't you use Alexa or Google now or whatnot? We shouldn't. We will. The reason we didn't and I'm actually it's a good question and an open topic because for us, we started with TTS. TTS goes for to a text to speech, what Alexa does amazingly well, but the problem for us that all TTS voices, the Googles and the Amazons and the series and the bydos of the world and so forth, didn't achieve a full emotional range and a full human range of experience and people thought that they are working out with a robot. So what we did, we took a step back. We created our own proprietary technology to stitch real human voices. We're bringing the world's best trainers, recording them in the studio and we stitched their thousands of keywords into full sentences. And the day that we will get a full emotional range, which is very soon and we're already prototyping in some other languages, we will utilize those. We have no intention to compete or to be an enabler for the voice part. We are laser focused on our vertical. I see. And the fitness part that makes sense, makes a lot of sense focus. That's what we got to do as startups. Let's go back to Alexa very quick. Now you represent the Alexa fun. Correct. Let's talk to me more about that. What kind of companies are you looking for? What what kind of companies are interesting? Yeah, anything you can talk about fun? I'm sure we've got some entrepreneurs here . Anyone working in a voice enabled technology in for their startup? All right. Well, this is for you. You've got. Well, and I bet maybe more hands will go up when I remind people that Alexa is now the things that Alexa or echo devices can do go beyond just voice. Obviously, the voice assistant is the thing that everybody really knows most about. But when you consider the different devices that we have in market, there's also screens on them. There's computer vision and some of the cameras that we have. There's touch ability. So Alexa works on fire TVs. So it is a increasingly a multimodal experience. And when we really engage companies around the many things Alexa can do now, just instead of it just being a voice assistant, we oftentimes end up having conversations with companies who said, you know, I've wanted to take my my product into a more multimodal type of experience. And we oftentimes engage with companies that way. But the three things that that we invest in in a in a in broad categories are companies that are building skills, which are like our apps, companies that are using our framework called Alexa voice service to put into third party hardware devices. So it might be someone else's smart speaker, but that still has an Alexa inside of it. And the third are enabling technologies that make Alexa work better or that advance voice in general. So we've made investments in microphone technologies, a couple semiconductor companies recently. We had a company that was making a better wake word engine that was actually bought by Baidu. So we we've invested in also these enabling technologies that advance in general what we think are the the capabilities of voice and AI. So really, if you're a startup that is building, you don't have to just be working with our voice specific interface, you could be doing things that are enabling products and services to be multimodal, where voice is one of the modes, and we'd be interested. So as a developer, you know, I've, you know, many of us have are working in startups. I have limited resources. Maybe one person or part of a person to do voice stuff for my startup, unless maybe that's your focus. Why should I work with Alexa versus Google Home? Well, or whoever face I don't know what Facebook has, but yeah, we we try to make, you know, we we're constantly expanding the number of things that Alexa can do and simplifying them from a skills perspective. We try to generate more API's to make the connection points between the different things that companies would want to do with their skills, and effectively just make it easier and easier to hook into Alexa's framework. If you become part of the Alexa fund as well, and it's a very selective process, it's just as selective as any VC would would go through. But our Alexa fund companies also get a bear hug from a team that makes sure that whatever they're specifically building on with Alexa is is getting attention from teams that are and we give them much more support than we can give sort of a typical company. So we do a lot of documentation to make Alexa as self serve as possible. But then we have the pleasure on in the Alexa fund to work a little bit more closely with our with our portfolio companies. What are a couple of cool companies you've done in the last year, not playing favorites? Yeah, things that people might find interesting where we might not expect. Yeah, great. I mean, we've done. So we recently invested in active, which is another company in the in the workout space. We invested in a German company called Tato, which has a deep, deep focus in European heating systems for the home. And we're very excited to be investing them out of our new global initiative. We invested, like I said, in a couple of semiconductor companies that reduce the power need that's required in an always on device. We invested in a company called Seven Rooms, which really is one a good example of a of a next enterprise play of how Alexa is going in to reshape the way that restaurants are managed. So it's really we're we've done a we started with a bunch of consumer focused applications. But one of the things that's happened over the last 12 months is Alexa's become a lot more enterprise focused as well. And Alexa is going into homes. It's going into sorry, into businesses. We've built a whole group of people that work on hospitality so that how does Alexa work in hotels and hosted properties. So those are all places that start to get us into the enterprise applications. So as a developer, OK, so I'm convinced, you know, working, building on that platform, maybe even getting funding from you guys, if possible, it sounds like an amazing opportunity. But how much money am I going to be able to make if I were to do an Alexa skill or work on the Alexa platform? I mean, that sounds like hard going to make. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, we we've we've now started. Yeah, so there were companies that could monetize like Uber, Uber, for instance, was one of the first companies that was that built a skill in a widely used application that abstracted effectively the Uber app into into voice. They could obviously monetize the ride that was being reserved off of Uber if you were using Alexa. But increasingly, we've introduced ways for developers to to monetize. First, we're rewarding the most popular skills on the site. But increasingly, we're allowing for skill developers to integrate paywalls and you even utilize Amazon Pay so that customers can buy things directly through through Alexa. So I think that we by opening that capability just this year, we're going to start to see and we're starting to showcase now more and more developers and companies that are monetizing and are able to build big audiences right and then also be rewarded for their the popularity of their work. Those sound like some great stories. And I'm sure there's going to be many more to come. Can't wait to see what you guys keep doing. You keep pumping out amazing things. So now I'm really what kind of stories do you have? I mean, you're you're a fitness you've got this it's like you've got this laser focus on this pretty important application. It's a very novel product. I mean, just having all that in your ear. Yeah. I know that getting encouragement and getting real time coaching that has helped me to you know, I do pushups every day with a group of three other guys over a WhatsApp group. And that's been working really well. Been able to hold to keep my nearest resolution. So I think this stuff works, but it's still, you know, it seems pretty futuristic. It's kind of sci-fi. Do you any stories? Any testimonies? Like have people actually gotten seen results? We have we have thousands of stories, but I'll try and break it down into an easy to understand down to earth one. So I think the first is affordability. Yeah. Many, many people that do not live in affordability, affordability. Basically, people that cannot go into an equinox or to a top tier personal trainer gym and go into a real one on one personalized, which is a very important word. And I don't want to get into the regular pre-recorded, you know, content out there, but they don't want to pay trainers out there. So we have many, many stories of people that found V as the only entity that can keep them accountable to keep a fitness routine. We have amazing stories about people with either disabilities or recoveries from injuries. So it's not just about weight loss. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's it's basically it's a way it's way beyond some smart insights and steps and heart rate cadence. It's and she makes you laugh. She gets you the right music as she keeps you accountable between the workouts themselves. So it gives people framework. Why headphones? Why not do it on a speaker? Like when I'm a Bluetooth speaker and I just saying so we will be on speakers and basically the way I see it and it's also related to the monetization part. Think about it. You guys should think about it as you know 2008. Remember Nokia and iPhone as a very interesting junction that this world went through. And basically think about what people thought about tax screen applications in terms of smartphone. And I think that exactly this is what happens now with built in voice vertical applications. And for us headphones is a utility. I look for any type of connected audio device that we can live in including home devices. So stretching yoga mindful sensations nutrition sleep and falling asleep. So any place that V is a body and mind companion will be able to communicate with you. We will be there. We still need to be focused. So currently you see us within the more cardio world. But we are expanding our use cases and traction as well. Yeah I guess it'd be hard to do heart rate if it was a Bluetooth. Exactly. So you actually have heart rate monitors in the ear. Correct. Wow. Correct. The AI you don't have to wear that chest strap anymore. Or I guess if you had a wearable product. Yeah. We will be in Apple watch very soon. But basically most of the intelligence in the storage sits in the cloud. But you do need our device our premium our sense device if you want ECG level heart rate gyro matter to get your posture and steps and so forth. Let's see. What's hard about what you're doing. A lot of hard things. But you've seen 60 companies so it will take more time. But I'll give two simple examples of what's hard about it. I think the first thing that was hard but now we're in a very powerful place at last. It took us more than two years to get the voice experience right just to get to the steal the use case into an immersive playing or experience using music and voice super hard that we won't get into it. But ten iterations at least with lots of mistakes. Tens of millions of dollars that we needed to invest until we got it right. But we are there and you can look at the reviews out there and the product the product market feed is there but we took us we almost died literally five times in between the second is marketing the ability to market and communicate value prop of a voice product is almost impossible into this world unless you have you know you're not a startup and you want to invest tens of millions of dollars in it. But we find very clever social and audio related parts to explain what is the use case ask yourself how do you explain people what does one minute a voice experience sounds like that you can't compare the product into many other apps. So got a couple of minutes left so I'm going to ask you guys to close with one thing. It's 2018 when that slush 2028 comes around. Or maybe 2023 five years pick your pick your favorite slush. What's Alexa going to be like. I think if I mean one we would love for Alexa ultimately to be like this always available always useful assistant that just kind of blends into the background of everything. And so you know maybe one vision is when we're at the dinner table and people are having a conversation but they're looking at their phone to look up something that's coming up on a schedule or reminder about something else like that that those things start becoming like the devices go away. But an assistant that's just around you starts taking care of those things. So her is Alexa. All right 2023 what's V going to be doing. Are we going to have headphones still. She's going not necessarily for all use cases but yes help her phone is going to be a core part of it. V is going to be your A.I. entity for your body and mind basically your companion or your partner to keep you accountable between your text or voice based devices to help you reach your goals. So body and mind. So it's just it's a fitness coach but it's also absolutely a meditate. Is there a meditation thing. There is we also where we released a few betas to some of you guys maybe so and tested it that we're still not out there yet with a commercial product. But absolutely as we will cover body and mind. So to learn more V V.I. trainer dot com. Right. OK. Very cool. Sounds like an amazing product. Both of you guys congratulations on all the work that amazing work that your companies have been doing. Thank you so much for joining. I think that's all the time we have for it. Yeah. Thank you. Cheers.