VOICE Round-Up 1: Full Episode

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A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y-M-A-C-H-I-N-E-Y.

It's Machine Yearning from Assist. It's a podcast where we think and dream about the future of AI, the talking internet, and how we're reshaping our culture. Bias in our culture and in our technology, particularly in AI, is a mammoth issue. For those of you in the Machine Yearning faithful, you've probably noticed that we have a point of view about it here at the pod. If you hadn't noticed, last week's episode with Janine Yuzel and this week's will make our position quite clear. We think being intentional, breaking bad hiring and management habits, and building inclusive teams is the only way the voice and AI space can avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. This episode, we have 3 guests who provide guidance on how we can do that as we return to the VOICE Summit. Again, shout out to the MoDev team, the conference producers. For taking great care of us. Our guests are from the agency and user experience design world, and each of them in different ways talk about how to make the most of this moment in time and how the emerging voice space could blow it. First up, Will Hall, the chief creative officer at the RAIN Agency. Will starts with the broadest view of how brands need to evolve and work in smart new ways to own their brand voice so they move beyond recommendation and into anticipation. Machine Learning Producer Michael Elsesser talks with Will Hall at The Voice Summit.

So people have been saying ever since brand as a concept and as a practice, you know, started to really come online in the '80s and people got serious about it, brand voice became the term. And now we're really finding out that you gotta go up so many more levels than what you ever thought possible.

Yeah. You've heard a lot of scare tactics, if you will, around voice, like it's the death of brands. We actually don't think so. In many ways it's the liberation of brands because if you lead, we advise brands to really start with voice and have that inform your larger ecosystem. Okay, so why? Because voice is conversational. Nobody's looking for your brand in 2018. Everybody's looking for what your brand does. It's out here at the content level. But voice is different from a podcast even. I love podcasts, but a podcast is a one-way thing. Voice, you can have a conversation. When you start to think about your brand, not just having a monologue projection one-way voice, but what are my ears? How do I listen? How to respond in kind? What's my relationship like? I think those are new muscles to build for a lot of brands.

What's the rationale people are using if they're trying to make that assertion it's the death of brand?

Frankly, I think a lot of that has to do with the transactional nature. I think the death of brands part is a lot of brand equity is based on a visual. There's visual equity there. You look down, you see candy. Oh, candy. Well, what happens when that's invisible? Take a brand like Campbell's, 160-some-odd-year-old soup brand. What happens if that visual equity is gone? So that's part of it is that what's that, again, participatory layer that you can start to make your brand relevant when things go invisible. And as well, when you think about the disruption that's happening in retail, I mean, this is— I'm not the first to say this, this disintermediation that's happening where it's a passive thing. Purchasing is becoming more and more passive and voice is sort of the interface for a lot of that. That has a lot of disruption. So when you hear these projections like, you know, over the next 4 years there's going to be $40 billion or whatever transacted through voice. The problem with that is, is that it builds implicit bias. In the case of Amazon, it tends to default to the last thing you purchased. So that's good if you're the first one. It's really bad if you're the second one. And they probably didn't ask for you by brand. So that's why they talk about brand. I didn't ask for Duracell. I asked for batteries. It gave me one and now it built in an implicit bias.

Right. Yeah. Hence the rise of, of the Amazon Basics.

Exactly. Yes.

Circling back to where we were earlier, though, in some ways voice becomes another execution point just as social and print and display and like all these other execution points. But it is still like really figuring out who are you, what do you stand for, what is your true purpose?

Yeah, and I totally agree. And I would also say at an even higher altitude of which Voice is a part, there's a fracturing that's happened. You know, we joke that, you know, in the same way you don't have 3 TV networks anymore, obviously you've got thousands and, you know, add to the internet and social and all this sort of fracturing that's happening and everything's vying for your attention that requires requires brands to have more discipline in the continuity between those touchpoints. You're not having a 1-hour-long conversation. You're having 60 1-minute conversations, and more likely, whatever that is in seconds. And it's how do you string all those different touchpoints together? Something we talk about is how do you have one conversation with 1,000 little chats?

Yeah, how do you be the same person when you walk in every room? Display, social, voice.

That's right. And I think one of the things brands will have to figure out, how do you not just give your— so, okay, great, you're on Amazon, great, you're on Google or whatever. How do you not make them now the voice for your brand. Why is Alexa your voice now? Is that good? Maybe, right? But how do you make sure you're the owner of your data, that you have a single source of truth that's doled out across those touchpoints?

Yeah. So now here's one. So the gunk that has built up that separates brands and consumers. So natural language comes in, and somebody can now go into retail and say, show me a 60-inch TV with the best sound and the truest black and whites, because they're a TCM fanatic and they want the best experience for the Maltese Falcon. And so they can stand in front of 30 monitors and the 3 that are the best— yeah, yeah, light up for them, and then they get to choose which one. And I was talking to somebody about that and they said, wow, that's a very, very educated consumer. Like, no, that's somebody that says, this is just me truly saying what I want.

Yes.

I love that idea. Also love Maltese Falcon. But I would also say that I think that's a promising future. But where I even see that vectoring to, and I could be wrong, I'm just talking here, but is, you know, we're sort of inundated with recommendations. You know, Amazon is based on their recommendation engine. 70% of YouTube traffic, as I understand, is based on their recommendation. So I saw some stat that some— this is the spirit of truth— that we get 40,000 say, hey, do you want this or that moments over time? And it's creating this cognitive overload. And when I see voice and more specifically the AI that's underneath that getting more and more mature, I hope that it vectors to a place that's not just about recommendation but rather anticipation, that it can actually already know I'm into Maltese Falcon, this is totally your movie because you like black and white, this has deeper crushed blacks, thank you. And so I think that is where a lot of the technology we've invited into our lives has created isolation, an overwhelming amount. We thought computers were gonna make our lives easier, I don't necessarily think so. But I believe as things get more mature, hopefully they can start to repent for, make good for some of the sins you could argue have been made early on. By actually being an assistant for me and not just an assistant to broker data or sell me soap, but actually make my life better.

Anticipation seems to really be the horizon that so many folks are pointing to.

I really think it is. And I would also like to add a bit of a nuance on that. You know, I'm obsessed with self-driving cars for a thousand reasons. But something that struck me is that early on, of course, there's a number of ethics and people are asking this, that, or the other. But one of the things that's come up is like, How can I imbue my driving sensibility on a disintermediated interface like you driving for me? And so you can actually start to say, I want this car to drive altruistically, humanistically, protective, random, etc. And so my will is imposed on this AI that's acting on my behalf. And when you start to think about now, you know, yes, I want things to anticipate, but actually what I really want is my partner, this AI partner, not a replacement for humanity, but and augmentation to humanity. It's acting on my behalf and negotiating those things the way that I would want to negotiate with it. Right now, most of this AI is about selling you stuff. But the idea that it could— what if, what if you could have AI that says, I want to be healthier, I want to make better financial decisions, I want to make this, that, or the other happen, and it could start to act on my behalf to make those things happen. I love that idea. Yes, anticipation, but anticipation with my will sort of baked into it.

If the Blue Sky client came in What do you have in your back pocket that you want to pull out?

Yeah, I would say designers are obsessed. I'm speaking from architecture. I think design in some ways synonymous with control and control lends you to systems. There's a reason why Frank Lloyd Wright made the chairs in his house and made the curtains and made everything. It's a whole thing. There's this idea of Wagner in the idea of musicals and things like this. How is the scent, is the sound, is the music, is the lighting, it's everything all together. And as a designer, I've always been drawn to large, complex, interdependent systems. So for us, the key is systems. I actually don't get but so excited about small one-offs, especially in voice, because it undercuts their potential of a ubiquitous voice assistant. So for me, the, the, oh my gosh, I would love that. Give us a system. It is also interesting when— this isn't a new idea, but as you start to democratize these tools and you have students who actually don't know what they don't know, and they start to hack something in a way that they get unexpected things sort of emerge from that. And I'm actually been keeping an eye on academia in that way. And, you know, it's just interesting some of the stuff that they've approaching it from a totally different perspective. And, you know, a lot of the students I've had at NYU, they talk about this— they're not saying this explicitly, but they're starting to look at technology as being anthropomorphic. You know, yeah, it's listening to me and I can talk to it. What if it can see me? What if I can touch it? How might that respond? What if, what if, what if? And there's been some wacky experiments coming out of Cranbrook as well as NYU and ITP and things like that. I'm interested. It's easy to discount some of that stuff, say, oh, that'll never happen. But the seeds of this idea of us merging technology and being Technology being interfaced with our sensibilities, like voice, like touch, like sight, that makes a lot of sense. And I love that people are exploring that in a more hacker spirit as well as just trying to drive bottom-line initiatives.

Machine learning.

Will Hall pointing us toward the future of AI, design, and the human-technology relationship.

Machine learning.

This week and next, we're bringing you conversations we captured at the VOICE conference. With over 2,000 attendees at the largest gathering of the conversational technology world, VOICE was intense. Next week, Kathy Pearl from Google and Patricia Scanlan, who has built a natural language dataset from over a million samples of children under 12. Both Cathy and Patricia have profound natural language processing experience, and we found them to be both inspiring and a lot of fun. Got an idea for a guest you'd like to hear on Machine Yearning? Let us know. DM us @Assist on Twitter. Up next, Joseph Hapley, the founder and CEO of Ether, a DC-located digital agency. Joseph and his teams have delivered solutions for brands the government, and not-for-profits. We loved his candor, and we think you will too.

So for, you know, really since the '80s, when sort of brand management became much more three-dimensional and really emerged as its own— yeah— discipline, the idea of persona, you know, what is the personality of the brand— yeah— came online.

And now we have little persona that are being built, actual personas, like you got chatbots that you, you know, that you can talk to. Persona is key because you don't want to be the blah safe brand. I would rather be beloved by, you know, a small, fierce few than just kind of be like lukewarm to everybody because then it's like you see it, you forget it. It becomes a utility at that point. As opposed to this trusted part of your life.

That's the conversation that all the brand people and the agency people have when we kind of get together and we're—

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're drinking our own Kool-Aid.

We're talking each other up before we go in for the pitch.

But then you like, but how do you—

Get in the room with the client.

Yeah, how do you do it?

How has that conversation changed? I mean, are the clients really getting there these days? Are they recognizing that the stakes have shifted and there's If everybody's spicy, then that becomes bland.

True. You get a lot of that, of the, give me the flavor of the month. Like, yeah, I saw this thing that so-and-so did.

Do—

it's pretty much, it's a lot of like, do that for me. And it's a hard conversation to try to steer away from because most people don't like the answer. And the answer is the shoes that fit fit Michael aren't necessarily gonna fit Yosef and vice versa. So you have to, you can build up to that same level of engagement, but you gotta do it in your own way that's authentic to your brand and your core values.

How do you start talking to people about getting honest about stripping away how much crap that's both these digital executions and all these marketing tactics?

It's one word. No, it really is. It's, you got to—

Say no to the client.

Yeah, absolutely. Say in the most direct and professional, honest way that you can is, nah, I appreciate that idea, but I don't think that's the right move. No. And the way it goes over when you say no is that not only are you on the line, I'm also on the line too. So I'm, if you're not successful, then I'm not successful because success to me is, you know, proven out by you calling me back for the next gig or for, or you referring me to your colleague who's, you know, works over at XYZ organization, you know, or you've touched, you know, X number of lives. So you can only do that if you are, you know, if you're being focused and, you know, chasing, you know, the shiny new object. It might be in line with your brand. A lot of times it's not. You got to start by saying no. And then if you back that up with the data, then the numbers just make the case for you. So, yeah, no is very powerful. It's hard, but it's a very good tool that, you know, keeps you from chasing a shiny new object.

So we're just spending a lot of time looking at agency and representation. Who's in the room? How are these decisions being made? Because who's on the inside?

How much time you got? Okay.

So as you're talking to brands, you're leading them, and you're building these sort of representative teams, how are you talking them through that process?

Whew, that's a, let me tread lightly here.

I told you we were gonna dig in.

Yeah, yeah, you did, you did. And I'm glad you are. So I will say, I'll speak to the ad agency industry because, you know, I've spent a good bit of time there, spent, you know, spent some time on the, you know, brands marketing side and then also in the nonprofit and government space. The conversation has absolutely changed and elevated much more Recently, I think we're doing a much better job with, I'll say within the past 5 years or so, you know, than we ever have. I remember very vividly in some cases being not just the youngest person in the room, but the only person of color. And I remember also being a little bit hesitant with speaking up at things where I didn't think, I wouldn't necessarily say that they made me uncomfortable, but things that I think were not necessarily representative. And we did in ad agency land a lot of the same. You know, we call up the same talent, the same vendors. And what happens when you get the same? You get the same result. But I think there is a, you know, a broad swath of, you know, the world that, you know, is not blonde-haired, blue-eyed white girls. I'm sorry. That's just what a lot of the ad agency was. That was sort of like the safe customer persona. And, you know, I think once we started to get more representation, you know, no disrespect to blonde hair, blue-eyed white girls if you are one, but I think, you know, we've done a really good job of representing you. And so when we started to change the dynamic around the table, start to just, you know, take off those blinders and bring more people of color, more women, more LGBTQ representation, all of these things around the table, and actually say, hey, there's a business case for diversity. It's, you know, because a lot of those people were there that fit in all those different categories that I just mentioned, but I don't know if they necessarily felt comfortable or felt safe voicing that position. But now it's something that is absolutely on the table. It is discussed, it is open, and I can only hope that more, you know, companies, more agencies, and organizations, you know, do more of the same.

You know, it's one thing to move from being part of the consumer base because you just like, somebody's got to buy soap.

Yeah.

Somebody's got to buy toothpaste.

Yeah.

To having representation in the room around some decision-making, to actually have agency to be guiding the decisions.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Actually have a choice. To bring this full circle, how do we, you know, talk about this within the voice space? You know, like, what does Siri sound like? What does Alexa sound like? Do we have people who are native language speakers who are on the development side or on the QA side? Do we have people, you know, who can speak to accents and be able to, you know, to clarify those things? We, you know, there are some, you know, little cultural nuances. I think the more intentional we get about it, the more successful, you know, brands will be, the more successful we'll all be.

So people get that at the intellectual level now, they get it at the at the gut pain avoidance level because they've all seen the social media fails. Yeah, right.

No, nobody wants to be that.

And now you've got to get them to where they move beyond it being— it's sort of surplus brain space. It's like, I'm going to do my core business activities and then I'll think about that diversity thing.

Yeah, add a little sprinkle on the, on the top, right? Right.

Yeah, yeah, that's our final 5%.

Yeah, yeah.

And so now you're like working with people to get to that being the central part of the work, meaning like it's just baked into the middle. Yeah, just like everything else, right?

I heard a quote, it's, uh, I can't remember where it came from, but it's, uh, you know, if you, if you bake a cake and you forget to put the sugar on it in, in the recipe, you can't just throw it on top after the fact and it has the same taste. No, you gotta, you gotta bake it in. It's got to part of the mix. And I think that happens at an institutional level. You know, I think that happens at, you know, at a leadership level. It has to be intentional. It has to be thoughtful. It has to be— if you put it into the process, then it makes all the difference. And, you know, and it shows. But I think people really just, they, I would say maybe even need to be pushed a bit to, you know, to step up and to say, bring your full self into this. You know, it's okay to, you know, to be who you are because that's part of the definition of talent. It's you. It's not just the, you know, the pedigree or the school that you went to or the degrees that you have and blah, blah, blah. It's, you know, you bring your full self into it. So I think where people feel empowered to do that, you're going to have messages that resonate better with, you know, with customers, you're going to have better reviews, you're going to get more repeat customers. So example, I just went to Essence Fest, I guess it was 1 or 2 weeks ago in New Orleans, and you have some like really big brands there. And I was impressed with the— with their level of authenticity. Essence Magazine, it's, you know, the core audience is Black women and you could look at it and tell, it's like, This comes from, you know, that authentic experience. And I gotta give it, I'm talking about like some of the top 10 brands out there, they did an excellent job of, you know, of representing that story well. They didn't appropriate it, it was the real deal. And that's just, you know, that's just one example. So it's—

A brand that's gonna go to Essence Fest is a confident brand.

You better be.

Why are agencies still struggling so much with this?

I think that they want to do the right thing, but maybe the execution has fallen flat. It has to be in the people, it has to be in the culture, and it has to be played out as a positive business result. It cannot be, it has to be looked at as something that actually makes sense and dollars and not just something that's, you know, a feel-good, nice to have that we do during Black History Month in February. It's, you know, if you bring it, you know, into the people, And that's just, you know, that's Black people, that's, you know, Latinx culture, Asian, you know, whatever, whomever, especially now. I mean, well, let's talk about the elephant in the room. I mean, we have migrant culture in the US today. Like, that is a hot button issue. How do we address that responsibly and do so in a way that says, I see you, I acknowledge you, I support you. And you are core to our business. We don't survive without you. And I think the brands that are brave enough to have that conversation are the ones that are going to continue to thrive. I think the ones that kind of shy away from it are going to be, you know, the Johnny-come-latelys, you know, and the Jane-come-latelys. But, and it'll be clear. And then the ones that don't talk about it at all, I think they're going to honestly go by the wayside or again, they might get fried on Twitter for not doing enough, for not acknowledging things like that. It has a lot to do with just being brave enough and, you know, and taking a stand. I'd rather be, you know, bold and wrong than just like, again, like lukewarm and right, because you say like, ah, I didn't lose too much. Yeah, but you lost the point.

Thank you.

You know, I sincerely appreciate it. Thank you so much for the, you know, for the invitation. I love the fact that ASSIST is investing in this and that you are pushing this, you know, this conversation. Absolutely. Love it.

Machine learning.

Joseph Hapley from Ether.

Machine learning.

In both our conversation with Yosef and Nuance's Brooke Hawkins coming next, there's a crystal clear message. Brands that do not pull from every corner of the emerging American culture are going to lose out. A D&I program run out of HR isn't going to prepare you for multiethnic America, particularly on the talking internet. Brooke goes even deeper into these ideas as she outlines a compelling view on why an understanding of ethics, philosophy, and the liberal arts is going to be a competitive advantage in designing useful voice technology. Hey, you put empathy in my coding. No, you put coding in my empathy. Delicious. Two great tastes that taste great together.

Creating frameworks for ethical conversational design.

Mm-hmm.

What does that mean to you?

It means to me kind of synthesizing expertise from other disciplines that I think we as technologists maybe have blind spots on. I think creating easy actionable steps that we as designers can, can take from disciplines like philosophy or ethics or different humanities really to embed and infuse into our technology work. Obviously we're all not going to be experts in ethical philosophy, but it would be wonderful if we could kind of create these frameworks and tools toolkits that boil down those concepts in ways that we can make actionable and then teach new designers that are entering the field, especially designers that come from a more computer science background to get comfortable and familiar with this stuff.

If you're positing that you can create frameworks for ethical conversation design, is the inverse that there are people out there doing unethical conversational design?

I— yes, I do think there are people doing unethical conversation design, but I don't think they mean to. I don't think any business or designers actively approaching their job trying to be malicious, but I think sometimes— definitely we're designing on behalf of large businesses and large institutions and we have goals and financial goals often that are driving why we make certain design decisions. But my hope as a designer is to create frameworks that challenge people to think outside of those tactical business goals and kind of approach things from a more humanistic perspective that can certainly take into account those business goals and achieve those, but kind of go a step beyond and make sure that we're being good human beings and providing patients and users and the people that are interacting with our systems resources to really improve their lives and perhaps challenge structural inequities that we either uphold or challenge through our digital tools.

You're doing work sort of training and developing new talent.

Mm-hmm.

Imparting some of these ideas to them. Let's talk a little bit about what you're doing with that and why you do it, why you love it.

Yeah, well, yeah, recently, most recently, one big education project that I've been working on is helping Career Foundry, an online UX course, create a specific VUI, or voice user interface design, course to train new talent that's interested in entering the field. Yeah, we tried our best aside from teaching the principles of voice user interface design to weave in some kind of ethical questions like, as a designer, what would your manifesto be around privacy for children? Or as a designer, what would your practice be around always providing things like outs or responses to things like help or exit or emergency or things like that? Kind of outside of just teaching designers the way to design an effective system, kind of pushing them one step further to think about how to design a humane system. And I love it. I think this field is very new, and the work of training and supporting designers, especially diverse designers now, will be integral to the future of this field. I think if as designers we, in this voice space and conversation space, put out a lot of products that haven't been designed by diverse people, then the public won't adopt them and they'll find them to be frivolous or silly or ineffective, and then we'll miss our moment. So I think it's, it's a really important time to get a lot of diverse voices in the room and smart thinkers in the room to, to really bring these voice and conversational experiences to scale.

Let's talk a little bit more about how you teach people to have this active deliberation process and to bot intercept and sort of negate or off-ramp or just train out those limiting factors?

Well, I try to have especially the clients I work with think through the implications of the choices that we're letting users make. For example, I've worked with larger insurance companies to design virtual agents, and there are a lot of business rules and logic that I think just as a byproduct of the insurance agencies that's how they work. If you have a lower education level or if you make less money or if for a variety of factors you receive a poorer insurance rate, that's a perfect example of thinking through, well, we may not be able to challenge this, you know, structural inequity. This is kind of, this is how insurance works. But how in this conversation, as a real agent would, can we be a little radical and perhaps add a little bit more explanation about why a user is getting a poorer rate? And perhaps some information about how they could receive a better insurance rate or why that structural inequity exists through conversation.

You see the credit companies attempting to do that. Mm-hmm. You know, it's a highly questionable business sector in some ways anyway, but when they're trying to explain, you know, factors that affect your credit score.

Mm-hmm.

Are we talking about things like that?

Exactly.

Yep.

Mm-hmm. And I think just empowering users with information through a conversation, even when, yeah, we can't change the way credit scores work as conversation designers. That will take a lot of time. I want to eventually, but yeah, exactly. How through a conversation can we provide a user with actionable information to help them change the situation they're in in a positive way?

With AI, you know, the errors are part of the intelligence. I mean, that's how everything is learning, right? But with these chatbots, these healthcare applications, I mean, this really does feel like we are redefining the concept of high-stakes design beyond other areas that we've thought of as high-stakes design, which was airbags, these physical safety things. This is more emotional, relational, intellectual high-stakes, but just as on the surface and urgent.

Cheryl Platz, a designer at Microsoft, just wrote a really cool article from a designer's perspective But these artificial intelligence tools like Alexa and Google Home and all these connected devices live in our homes. So necessarily, they're part of our relational experiences. They're either amplifying structural inequities or not. And I think as designers, we need to think through how we could limit these structural inequities. But again, the example is in domestic abuse situations, which exist, these voice assistants are are now in these spaces where domestic abuse occurs. They're in the home, they're in these private moments that usually there's no other third party witnessing, and these tools are sometimes being used in kind of manipulative relationships to amplify abuse. This article specifically talked about partners that would randomly turn up volume on systems at unexpected times and kind of make the other partner live in fear or give the other partner this feeling that they're being constantly monitored by a third party. So as we've designed them today, these tools kind of amplify that problem. And now designers are having to take a look at that unintended consequence and think, how could we have designed, or how can we change the design or update the design of these products to empower the, the party that's being manipulated or hurt also now by our tools to kind of take back or radically change that situation for them. Those problems happen, those unintended consequences happen, and then we're in the position of solving them retroactively, and it's clunky. We're kind of having to go back and add features or fix things that can kind of help, but I think what would be more radical, and as we're so new in this field, and what I think is really important is as new products are being developed, how from the beginning can we bring in diverse thought leaders and perspectives from the development phase of these new products so that that was never a potential unintended consequence. Perhaps if more women were at the table or more people with diverse domestic experiences were there when those products were being designed, they would have had the input or thought that, hey, this could be used to negative ends. How can we prevent that from happening?

What we see right away is that introduces the idea of active monitoring.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. And you have the ethical rub of if we're doing active monitoring for good, meaning personal health and safety and harmony in the home, versus active monitoring for monetization or commercialization or surveillance. Active monitoring becomes a real question in there.

Definitely, yeah. There, I think there have been a few examples so far of active monitoring being used for good. There was some article that came out, this family was having a domestic dispute and Alexa through whatever processes, I don't know if it was confirmed how it occurred, but was able to call the police and, you know, bring in support to that situation to kind of squash it and help that family in that instance. There's been other instances of active monitoring where someone's private conversations were recorded and then sent as a voice memo to a friend unintentionally. So we're seeing slow examples of these kind of unintended consequences of active monitoring. Yeah, being a hero in some instances and in other instances being really creepy and odd.

Terrific.

Thank you.

This was fun.

Thanks.

Good. Really good. All right.

Thanks for listening. And thanks to Will, Yosef, and Brooke for giving us some of their time at VOICE 2018. Next week, Kathy Pearl from Google, Bree Glaser from the Mars Agency, and two folks who are doing fascinating voice technology for kids, Patricia Scanlan and Adva Levin, all from The Voice Summit 2018. Get in touch on Twitter @assist, DMs are open. Tell us who you think should appear on the podcast. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this with someone who cares about how we make sense of these changing times. Machine Learning from Assist is made by Paul Chufo and Michael Alsesser for Limina House. Have a great day.