 It's released by Gardner out of a study, we'll talk more about that in a moment, but you'll start hearing more of that. We're going to talk about using WordPress not only as basically a browser-based experience, but expanding that beyond to other devices, VR gaming, implications through MarTechStacks, e-commerce, voice assistance, and a lot of personalization integrations that are coming to be. We'll talk about what is available now, and we'll also talk about some stuff that is not maybe quite mature, but there's some opportunities maybe for the entrepreneurial crowd to pick up on some of the things that are happening in the future. Quick background on me, I'm Steven Word, I'm the Innovation Program Manager at WP Engine based out of Austin, Texas. I'm a core contributor, not doing that a whole lot these days, but it's something that I'm proud of, and I owe a lot of my WordPress skillset to that community. I do maintain the RSS feeds component of WordPress, and largely people think that is dead and unimportant, and I'm going to make an effort to prove that wrong here today. I have quite a few plug-ins, I used to work for an agency here, and then on the fun stuff, I really enjoy making instrumental hip-hop, craft beer, and hiking, which is kind of hard in Texas, but give it a go anyway. The first thing I want to do is talk about Generation Z. So this is basically people born from 1996 to present, and they're the people that are coming online or basically where the market is heading. This is the crowd that we have to win over. If we want to keep growing, the WordPress space beyond the 30%, this is a very important demographic to cater to. They currently represent about 25% of the population, have about $40 billion of buying power in the United States. And the most interesting thing, or the biggest differentiator, is they are almost never on offline by the numbers. So 48% of this demographic believes that they want authenticity. This is one of the most important aspects of their online world, and we're not talking about authentication or login and credentials, but what we're actually talking about is legitimate reviews. People not gaming things like TripAdvisor or Foursquare, they want the experience to be genuine and truthful. They also say that about 50% of them will bail on a site if it doesn't cater to some level of personalization. Things like Instagram and Facebook, you see more and more of these things starting to appear, but it's becoming increasingly important and we should pay attention. Large majority of them also do not go more than a single day in a year without some sort of online interaction that could be through listening to a podcast, mobile devices, video games, but they're always online. And then 72% of them also say that the primary function on the internet for them is entertainment. This is also somewhat of a shift in the generations from the past. You usually view that as a source of information, it's where you get your news, but with the younger crowd, you know, they're more involved in things like Instagram, Netflix, Twitch, basically entertain me. So, yeah, contrast with the boomer generation, they were always on for news, right? They can go two, three days without the internet, no problem, a little bit better at detaching, but they do demand higher levels of security and privacy. This is also very interesting because it's kind of antithetical to what the generation coming online now is wanting, whereas they're willing to sacrifice personal data more for a more authentic and personalized experience. So here we go, just kind of the evolution of the internet from about the time I jumped on. And what you'll notice is as you move your way from left to right, everything is becoming more natural. So like in the early days, you had a terminal, no graphical interfaces. Even very early days, you didn't even have a mouse or a keyboard or any type of tactile way to interact with the computer. Then come the 90s, you start getting things like windows, mice and keyboards are a lot more popular. You get flashier monitors, beepers and pagers, it's kind of a step towards being online. Lots of cords, 2000s, you get WordPress shows up here, smartphones, tablets. This is probably like where things really started to shift. You start getting content management, so people are using databases and actually updating content on a daily regular cadence. It's not static environments that you saw early on. And then as we continue on towards present day in the future, it comes more and more of interacting with the web in natural ways. Things like being able to talk to your computer or your device or being able to predict what your next actions are. This is the direction that I believe that internet is going to continue to go. And once again, I think it's important for us to pay attention if we want to keep our dominance in the market. So back to this digital experience buzz term here. So the term is coined by Gardner. They're a marketing research company, very popular. I'm sure a few of you are familiar. So WordPress has always been in this quadrant called web content management. It focuses on security, dynamic content, basically catering to browsers and mobile devices with a strong focus on information. To contrast that, digital experience platforms, generally people in this space are things like Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, $100,000 products that are very expensive. And WordPress is starting to enter into this space and bringing a lot of those type experiences that are normally reserved for people with very large budgets, way down market. And I think that we can adopt some of these. So quick differentiators here, personalization. So being able to predict what you're going to do remembering you is getting a little harder with GDPR stuff as of lately. But it's still really, really important. Integrations are things like analytics, chatbots. Being able to take an article that you're reading on a browser, take that to the car and listen to it. Being able to control the content of a billboard on the other side of town as opposed to just being able to market through a single channel at home when someone is physically at their device. And once again, a strong focus on entertainment. So it's all about the integrations. So you have things like smart home and IoT devices. Through tools like If This Is Not, you can change the temperature of your house from Boston while giving a presentation. You can listen to audio. It can be published right there on the website. One of my colleagues actually has a very cool VR experience that we'll demo here in a little bit. And then, of course, mobile isn't going anywhere. One of the core focuses on this talk today is going to be on voice. And that's basically because that's where I spent my last six months of focus. So it's not necessarily a point of emphasis, but I do believe it is probably the most mature of the technologies we'll talk about for getting utilization out of it in present day. So it will be everywhere. So a couple of things that being able to listen to a site or listen to web content opens up, you can now multitask. You don't necessarily have to be on the tab or in the browser that you're looking at. You could be listening to the content from, let's say, the New York Times, while also shopping on Amazon buying new shoes. Voice assistants are definitely taking over. I think I have like four of these things in my house right now. I'm not exactly sure how that happened. And then also being able to reach people through channels that aren't necessarily the ones that we think of today. So this is my colleague on the right, Amanda. And what she is doing is actually consuming content from a website, from Politico, one of our customers, through Android Auto in the car. So whereas before, in order to reach your customer base, you always had to physically be at the device. Now you can do it while you're on a jog, driving to work, in a subway, et cetera. And once again, I just wanted to throw some more numbers around this. And why speech or text-to-speech and voice is so important. Research shows that people can consume and interact via voice about four times the rate that they can read or type. So what this means is a far more accelerated digestion of content. Gardner also states that about 20% of voice interactions over the next two, three years, and about 50% of searches by 2020 and 2021 will be done through things like Siri being able to, like, I have an Android, so I'm not really on the Apple bandwagon. But you can double click for Google Assistant and just actually ask your device and get a general result of not necessarily having to type it out. Once again, it kind of frees you up to do other things. So I'm going to talk about a variety of products. These are not necessarily endorsements. This one I do have an affiliation with, but it's not a monetary pitch, I promise. So Amazon had an API they released at Reinvent, their big tech conference back in 2016. The focus of this was natural text to speech. One of the things that was not available, though, was it was basically it took a developer to implement. Somebody had to have a strong technical background in order to leverage this. So it was a very, very cool technology. But unfortunately, it did not have a lot of adoption. Amazon is one of our infrastructure partners at WP Engine, and kind of serendipitously we ran into this team when one of our partners was up there talking about infrastructure stuff. And they kind of voiced an interest of like, hey, this WordPress thing is getting quite popular. Maybe there's something that we can do here, an opportunity, and it felt like a really good fit for us because it allows them to benefit from the entire reach of the WordPress ecosystem. And then it's also Amazon coming in and investing in our community and showing up for the first time. This is really the first time that they've ever actually made a product, maintained it, and keep it in the repo. It's also open source. If anybody wants to contribute or check it out, it is on GitHub. Now it is available in 27 languages and dialects. Anything from Mandarin to Korean to Welsh. Pretty fun stuff. We'll do a demo of that in a minute. And once again, this is just really a play to open up multi-channel. It's a way to expand your listening audience where you don't necessarily have that viewership previously. A lot of cases for things like Polly, navigation is kind of a natural fit. I'm sure we're all familiar with things like Google Maps. But some of the more interesting ones is actually like content creation and being able to speak to your editor rather than type it in. Video games, they're actually using this before voice actors come in and you have a 3D model. They're able to mimic the speech patterns and map those. And then I think my favorite one is this AI announcer icon. There's a tsunami in Australia a few years back. And it basically took out all of the broadcasting abilities. So what they were able to do is they were able to send out EMS updates using this service and keep basically people in the know, local in the community, up on what was going on in the status of the tsunami where it's safe where you can get clean water, et cetera. So now I've got to jump out of full screen real quick to give a quick demo. And also I've actually forgot to mention that I'm getting into the talk. All of these slides are already online. I will share a link to this at the end. And I also didn't try to pepper it in with links. So it's pretty interactive. Anything that is discussed here today will have a link where you can read more about it later. So that's a little small, isn't it? OK. So this is the front end experience of Amazon Poly for WordPress. So basically in the editor, we'll check that out in a moment, but you basically just create an article. You connect it to your AWS account and then it will render it into an MP3. You have a couple of options here. You can store that MP3 locally. It is all based on app render. So once you have the file, you own it. If you are trying to make a more scalable solution, you can also do things like store it on S3 for more concurrency or use a CDN like CloudFront. But just to give a quick idea of why this technology kind of leaps and bounds above, pay attention to the speech inflections, where you have a pause, commas. It has an understanding of the difference between contextual understandings. So under the difference between live and live, it knows what to do with the percent sign after 28. It's just really, really come a long way in the last 10 years. I don't know if you ever remember similar technologies from 10 years ago. They were pretty horrible. And I do not have a volume check, so this is really loud, but I apologize. Amazon Poly demo. Is that OK? Or is it impossible? OK. That is going to put a damper on some of the demos. Yeah, but I don't have volume control, so I apologize. We'll try to work around it. Oh, hey, that's a great idea. No. Oh, OK, we can do it from the AV booth. Great. OK, so you get the idea. As you can see, it's not quite human. And there are, like I said, 27 different languages and dialects. This isn't actually one of my favorite ones, but some of them get pretty close. I don't think we're getting it to the point where you can be fooled, but it's also not terribly abrasive to the ears, in my opinion. And then also, just in April, there was an update to the service. It is now leveraging a second API called AWS Language Services, which has translate features. So another cool thing, you can see right above the player there, it now has the ability to translate the content that was authored in English into English, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese. So give that a quick spin. And it also, in my opinion, does a much better job than we will translate on the transcription as well. I'm not so lucky anymore. But I can't possibly sign the adage in non-formal. You've got to press like. The open source of the ad, you've got it. And that's all out of the box. So the only two things you need to get this set up is AWS credentials. And then it's pretty simple. We'll go to the ad mineral quick. And we'll just explore some of the settings. So yeah, basic setup, all you really have to do is select region. So this is also used for the S3 storage, but it's basically where the transcription happens. You have options to display the player either before the post, after the post, or not at all. And the not at all case is more for the RSS syndication to iTunes, which we will show right after this slide. Yep, and so just a quick peek at all the languages that are currently available. Some of them are kind of fun. Icelandic is always a good one to listen to. But quite a few options there. It has SSML support. So this is a markup language for doing things like whispers. So you can whisper, shout. Suppose you had like a quote embedded in your text. You can wrap that in an SSML tag and you can have it like change the voice that it's using. So you can kind of have like a conversation flow throughout your article. These things are just related to S3 and storage. And then the polycast feature. So this is an RSS feed. Like I said, I'm trying to make a case for getting people back interested in RSS. Still a really, really great way to syndicate content. So this is an RSS template of the sole purpose of submitting to iTunes. It has a few, you can see actually the iTunes markup, that can be based on any taxonomy, tag, or archive. So you can create an individual podcast based on author date. If you just wanted one for your WordPress content or just your news and politics section, you can segment those out. And just to kind of give you a quick peek of what this looks like. So all I've done here is I took that URL that we just visited and submitted it to iTunes. And then it appears in the library. It takes about two days to appear. They do have like a vetting process. But this is basically Politico. So for those that don't know, Politico is a news and politics magazine based out of Brussels. And one of their goals online is to try to win the mornings. A lot of computer bases and they need their news very, very early. So when we first were approaching them with this idea, the podcast feature was actually the thing that they were most interested in. A lot of people to make their coffee while consuming the news. And once again, take it with them as they jumped on the tube or went for a morning jog. Just a quick demo of this again. This is actually a different voice. Okay, so you get the idea. And let's get back to the slides. Okay, so that is one of the voice technologies. Another one is made by our friends over at Ali Interactive, a guy named Tom Harrigan. This one is more focused around the interaction or the integration with Alexa. So what you can do here, all configurable via the WordPress admin. You can add your own custom skills. Once again, you do need an Amazon account. But it's all pretty easy to configure. It does not take a super high level of technical aptitude to set up. And the idea here is you can do things like, hey, Alexa, read me my flash briefing. And I have an example of this here. It did not bring an Alexa device with me. So I'm going to use this software version of it, which is a little buggy. This is not an official Amazon product, but it's kind of cool if anybody's ever doing any development with Alexa or you want to play around with this. EchoSend.io, let's try it. Alexa, read me my flash briefing. Work this morning. Okay. So anyway, what this would normally be doing is, so using that plugin that we just saw, VoiceWP, it would submit to my personal account where I have my news publications that I subscribe to. And then I could just ask my flash briefing in the morning as I'm moving around the house. Once again, sorry, the demo kind of fell short there. Another cool voice technology. This one is also a little bit different. This comes from Weston Rudder at XWP. Weston does a lot of work in the accessibility space. This is less about reaching more customers and more about making it easier to follow content along. So this is a read-along project, also open source, but it actually works completely offline using OSX's native text-to-speech engine. It only works in Firefox and Chrome at the moment. So we also expect more of the browsers to pick this up in the future. And just to give a quick idea of how this one works. Once again, very short, but keep in mind that this is all offline. So this is not pre-rendered. It's all coming natively from the press. As you can see, it's reading along. This would be great for basically, as you read along, you can pause. You can also rewind forwards and backwards, which is something that you can't do with the pre-rendered MP3s. So you have controls, I know they're a little small. You can fast-forward and rewind through the article. If you wanna reread something, maybe you're having a story with your kids or working on reading, they can actually read along and keep track. So I think that's pretty cool, too. And, all right, another cool technology that's coming out is this nurse in the chat box. With cloud coming online and processing power becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, it's also allowed machine learning to kind of have a little bit of a boom. So both Amazon and Google have services that kind of work in this space. Google's offering is called Dialogflow. And what you can basically do is set up just a bunch of strings and run a training model so that you can basically create a assistant for whatever you want. So if you have a car dealership site, you can set up something to be like showing me your current inventory. Amazon has a similar service called Amazon Lex. Same exact thing. It's a way to build conversation interfaces, probably very useful in things like support organizations. And before anybody asks, this is not what we use when we get our thing. So my chat bot is an open source plugin. There's a WordPress integration for Dialogflow. And we'll take a quick demo of that one. So once again, to simply install the plugin, configured, I used one of the pre-packaged chat bots available through Dialogflow, the one I chose was tell me a joke. So I don't really know if the joke's gonna be funny or not, but we'll give it a go. So you can just be like, tell me a joke. And so right now it reached out over an API, hit the Dialogflow service, and it came back. I think it's a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don't need it. But once again, I think the takeaway here is just, it's another way to reach a larger customer based on necessarily having to have humans on the ground. And these things could get pretty complex. Once again, it's based off a training model, so it'll improve over time. And my chat bot is the name of the plugin, also available in the WordPress review. Another interesting thing, this one's a little bit more emerging, but there's some people doing some really cool things in this space, so the internet of things. This is everything from Amazon Dash to your Nest, or any Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects. What you're looking at here, the picture on the right. So as you notice, the topic of this talk was WordPress is the hub of your digital experience. This came out of one of our hackathons. This is our analog experience machine. So this is controlling a WordPress site through different knobs and stuff. It's not really, it's more of a proof of concept and fun than anything. You can't really see it, but on the far left, I think my favorite feature is the toilet handle, which is how you flush the cache. I thought that was pretty clever. So yeah, using services like If This Then That and the REST API, there's a If This Then This integration called MAKE, which allows you to define your own skill for If This Then That. A guy named George Stefanis has a cool proof of concept for WooCommerce, where he actually has an Arduino device that will show account from the store of how many orders have been fully processed through a gateway, and then reflect that number on a digital display. So as you're walking around your shop, you can see how many more times you need to go to the post office this day. A personal project of mine that I did on a Raspberry Pi hits the WordPress.org. So every time there's a new release of WordPress, I don't know if you guys have ever seen it, but there's a counter, and it'll show you like the number of downloads. So it just kind of basically tracks the release and will show me how many people are using the latest version of WordPress. And then George also at WordCamp US this last year had an interactive WordPress badge so that people could visit his site while he was on stage and actually change the lights. Once again, these are kind of experimental and maybe not terribly practical, but it is an example of how WordPress can be used to hit things that are not necessarily based out of the browser. Once again, machine learning. This is, like I said, a result of basically cheap processing power. And it's kind of a buzzword, but what it really means is it means learning how to do something based off a very large data set. So using as many examples as you possibly can to answer questions. This is how Poly achieves their natural text-to-speech feel is because they actually have a very, very large set of human voices that were modeled, and through repetition and constant updating of that model, it's actually improving. So the API is actually more natural sounding than it was a couple of months ago. Google has quite a few offerings in this space, cloud translation. These are all basically backed by machine learning. People, if you're ever traveling out of the country, this Google translate thing is quite amazing. Cloud vision is image recognition. You also have speech and video intelligence. And then once again, the dialogue, the chat bot, which is the conversational interaction we saw earlier. A couple of things that are more in the WordPress space. So this is a product called WordLift. And what it basically does, once again, through very large data sets, looks at your content and makes constant suggestions. So it's able to suggest featured images. It's also able to make SEO improvements and schema changes. So not only is your content enhanced through extra content you did not have before, it actually will improve the search engine optimization of it. So your content is not only enhanced, but also reaching more people. Also available in the WordPress.org repo. This is a product that has been sunset, but I think that they were onto something really cool here. I really hope somebody picks it up. It's a project called Brenify. What they were doing is basically doing event tracking across your WordPress install. What was really interesting about this one is it actually had the ability to work across site. So for example, I have site A, and you are a user of mine. I have found that you are a particular fan of the New England Patriots. When you visit site B, I will already know that about you. So I can not only do things like targeting content that also improve revenue through ad marketing. So I think this is a really interesting one. It's also probably one of the ones that people are less comfortable with back to the generational gaps, right? My myself think this is borderline creepy, but in the name of getting market share, the younger generations don't seem to mind. More personalized experience is more valued. Another one, this is a feature inside of Jetpack called After the Deadline. This is also a way of improving content. I don't actually know the machine learning service backing this to try to find out, but it does things like can use for misuses of words to catch cliches, to give you content suggestions, kind of in the same way that WordLift was doing it for SEO, this is more focused around content. So you get things like spell check, grammar, and contextual understanding. This is another cool one, so virtual reality. This one was a little bit hard for me to wrap my head around because I was like, why would you ever build a virtual reality application to WordPress? Doesn't necessarily feel like the right tool for the job all the time, but then one of my colleagues began to convince me. So using the REST API, basically the editor experience for this is you upload a 360 image into the featured image section and then you can target different areas of the image and insert different content. So this one is very, very proof of concept. He actually has a video game that he's working on called The Broken Place, which will also be powered by the REST API. But where it really started to make sense for me is if you think of maybe like in-game purchasing through an e-commerce store. So if you have a video game that is driven in the content is being read out of the REST API through something like a motion where you reach out and pick up a product, you could put it into your backpack and you could actually have that be a point of sale through an e-commerce store. You could update the pricing because it's all fed in through the API. It's a really interesting way to manage the content of a video game. And once again, also open source, if anybody would like to check that out, VR WordPress, actually I think it's called VRPress, and then the GitHub repo is linked as well. So some emerging content opportunities. Once again, I think content personalization probably has the biggest upside. It's really, really challenging. But I think that if you can nail this, you probably onto a multi-million dollar market. Being able to do things like showing people content that you already know that they're going to like is a very forward thinking way, especially like things like media verticals, right? If you wanted to get really crazy with it, integrating something like Spotify with something like the Rolling Stone, right? If Rolling Stone was able to digest my Spotify playlist, you would know that I am a huge fan of Run the Jewels who don't like someone else, for example. So I'm more likely to engage more clicks and more ads served, which means more profitability. In-game purchases we just discussed. Chatbots can also minimize support costs if you're able to train them to a point where they're actually natural. I know a lot of us have inversions to pressing one to get a real person, but I actually think this is getting almost to the point of being pretty viable. Something cool that came out at the University of Cambridge is a service called Applying Magic Sauce, and this is not necessarily directly related to WordPress, but I think that you could interact with their APIs. So what this is going to do is it scrapes all your Twitter and Facebook information and builds a profile around you, and it is creepily accurate. So if you were to basically build a profile, back to you delivering content that people want to see, can do everything from tell you gender to age demographics to likely IQ, likely part of the world you live in, what your preferred dialects are. And then another one that just came out also from ReInvent is DeepLens. This is a standalone video camera attached to a small computer, and where I see this being really useful, so basically you train a model in the cloud and then you download it to this little DeepLens device, but you can have things like interactive billboards. You can start doing, serving ads on a billboard. For example, if someone is wearing a red baseball cap, maybe they would like a blue one, but if they're not wearing a hat at all, maybe you would be marched in and selling them hair products. So I think we'll also see more of these sort of things. These are some resources. I talked about quite a few of these, but just to keep an eye on, Headless and Mobile, still I didn't, you know, Rust API was one of the better things to happen with WordPress, but you know it doesn't, Gutenberg's kind of stole the thunder, but it's still an active development, and it's really the backbone of doing a lot of these. Apppressor is a way to take a WordPress site and basically make a native app out of it so that you can basically, without having to build a native app specifically for both devices, you can throw it into Apppressor and get both an iOS and an Android version of your site. The voice assistants we covered, so Amazon Poly for WordPress, VoiceWP and Spoken Word, all doing slightly different things, and also we are working with Tom on VoiceWP so that Poly and VoiceWP will integrate, so those two will be playing nice in the future. Stay tuned so you can use Poly to also create a lot of skills. The Internet of Things, such as the LED badge, and once again the links, almost all of these are links, so you can click through. The Chatbot, Twilio is another interesting one, and then the machine learning through things like WordLift, Brennify, after the deadline, and of course VR for WordPress. Some additional resources, so at the very top of the talk, we're talking about that Gartner study of defining the difference between a content management system and digital experience. They do a pretty good job of explaining this, and I would encourage everyone in the, if you only read one link out of here, key pace on this. This is how WordPress wins over the next few years, I think. We also have our white paper that we did on Gen Z. There's definitely some good insights in there. Links to Amazon Poly, voice search optimization, how to properly do SEO for voice search. It's a little bit different, machine learning on Amazon, and once again the VR project. So that concludes my talk. I have a few minutes, five minutes for questions. Oh, yeah, I'm sorry, it's wcbos.wpengine.com. Everybody hear that? Okay, okay. Wcbos, so like we're Camp Boss, at wpengine.com. I'm sorry, .wpengine.com. Okay, great. If you're also there at some point, let me see if I'll sign it back. I want to be, last thing you touched on around using machine learning to learn more about and make assumptions about people that are coming to your site. When done improperly, machine learning approaches in this way are basically chronology. They are reinforcing people's, machine learning is just a way of training the system to make predictions based on pre-existing assumptions. And so they do reinforce those assumptions, and if you're making deductions about someone's IQ or gender or race or age, just be aware that that can be very productive and can really have a negative impact if it reinforces all assumptions. So most of the machine learning applications you've touched on, if you're incredibly excited and fascinated with it, I'd also say make sure that you can take any recommendation with a grain of salt based on the fact that all of those recommendations are coming from our preconceptions around what things are related to. That's very simple. Kind of, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, because we've actually, we've seen this a couple of times, right? Google Photos has had a few faux pas. Twitter is definitely Facebook. It's also stepped in the mess. I really appreciate you bringing that perspective. Thank you. I think we're good then. All right, thank you for having me.