In Case You Missed It: VOICE Summit 2020

The 2020 VOICE Summit, powered by Modev, was held virtually this year from Oct. 5th-15th. This year's program included engaging talks, insightful keynotes and hands-on workshops to help create, build and market the latest innovations in voice technology. 

Over 25,000 developers, conversational designers, startups, brands, agencies and executives at the forefront of the voice-first era registered for this year's VOICE Summit. It's been a jam-packed second week with keynotes, panels, and talks from the voice tech industry's top creators, developers, designers, marketers and executives. Over the course of two weeks, we heard from the experts on the frontlines of voice technology for Google, Comcast, AWS and many more. 

The three most popular sessions in the first week were about moving from Alexa to Google Assistant with Rebecca Rolfe & Tommy O’Keefe at NPR, how financial institutions are banking on emotionally intelligent data with Rana Gujral at Behavioral Signals and about personalized voice interfaces with Enterprise-Grade Biometrics with Alexey Khitrov at ID R&D. 

“Banks were blown away by the upside [of using voice] and left clients much more satisfied,” Behavioral Signals CEO, Rana Gurjal said. “This is the magic of bringing people together to improve the engagement satisfaction metrics in an ethical way.”

Now in its fourth year, VOICE Summit continues to not only be the world's largest voice tech event, but also an exciting hub for innovation, talent, experience, and passion in the industry. Our sponsors were able to engage directly with attendees and 1,000 industry colleagues on a personal slack channel throughout the summit. 

This year’s conference opening keynote featured Jeff Blankenburg of the Amazon Alexa team. Jeff gave a big picture keynote on the future of AI that inspired developers to be good stewards of reliable solutions. He challenged the manual input of bills to the subjective nature of medical professionals to encourage the use of AIs for better results. Jeff closed his keynote with the dream of personal AI and the promising hope in solving problems with just our voice. VOICE’s Diamond Sponsor, Amazon Alexa also had a designated stage for two full days of content. 

VOICE teamed up with Google Assistant for Google Assistant Developer Day. Viewers learned about new features and tools, plus interactive sessions to connect with the Google Assistant team, including a fireside chat to answer top questions from developers.

Key speakers included:

• Gordon Midwood, Co-Founder of Anything World
• Chuong K. Nguyen, Voice Product Designer at Comcast Corporation
• Carolyn Reed, Lead Voice Researcher at Comcast Corporation
• Rana Gujral, Chief Executive Officer at Behavioral Signals
• Rebecca Rolfe, Voice Platforms Product Designer at NPR
• Tommy O’Keefe, Senior Software Engineer at NPR
• Noelle Silver, Founder of WomenIn.AI and the AI Leadership Institute 
• Karen Kaushansky, Senior Conversation Designer at Google
• Mark Tucker, Senior Architect of Voice Technology at Soar.com 
• Matt Vaillancourt, Director of NSP Sales at SonicWall
• Maryam Nabavi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Babbly
• Carla Margalef Bentablo, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Babbly
• Blaise Aboh, Co-Founder of AI Envoy Robotics and Lead Partner at Orodata Science
• Brook McCall, Director of Tech Access Initiatives at United Spinal Association
• Audrey Arbeeny, Founder, CEO and Executive Producer at Audiobrain 
• Tim McElreath, Senior Product Manager at Discovery Inc. 
• Harry Doukas, Senior Conversational AI Consultant at Amazon Web Services
• Christine Hart, Global Voice Coordinator at Nestle
• Tobias Dengal, Chief Executive Officer at WillowTree, Inc.
• Shivay Lamba, Head of Product at Metvy
• Andreea Danielescu, Manager, Future Technologies R&D at Accenture Labs
• Rebecca Evanhoe, Conversation Designer at Pratt Institute
• David Code, AI and VIU Writer at LinkedIn

Modev and Amazon Alexa are in the process of reviewing submissions for the Amazon Alexa Hackathon and will be announcing winners soon. There will be prize winners for both the Most Innovative Conversational Experience or Most Innovative Use of Multimodal Technologies categories with more than $6,000 in prizes available. Thank you to all who submitted their Alexa skill(s)!

It's not too late to access VOICE 2020! Register for updates, access, and the opportunity to hear content from two stages, dozens of sessions, keynotes from Jeff Blankenburg, Noelle Silver, Aariv Modi, and the first-ever virtual Google Assistant Developer day.