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Voice Technology Only Scratching the Surface: Q&A with Voysis

by Hugh Williams on 24th Oct 2018 in News

As consumers become more comfortable with voice technology, we will get used to seeing it everywhere. Not just through Siri and Alexa, but also integrated into retailers' websites and mobile apps. In this Q&A, RetailTechNews speaks with John Fitzpatrick (pictured below), VP product and engineering, Voysis, to see how they are driving the retail sector towards this point, and ask them about the technology required to make it happen. 

RetailTechNews: Who are Voysis and how does the technology work?
John Fitzpatrick: Voysis is the 'Complete Voice AI Platform'. The platform was built from the ground up by a team of scientists, engineers, and linguists with expertise in speech technologies as well as the application of end-to-end modelling approaches in cognitive computing and neural networks. Voysis utilises speech recognition, natural language processing and understanding, deep learning, and text-to-speech capabilities – all of which were developed in-house.
Our focus is on developing the next generation of voice technologies that will make voice interaction between humans and machines more natural. We recently announced our development of ViEW, 'Voysis Embedded WaveNet'. ViEW represents the next evolution of DeepMind's WaveNet technology making it available for use on any mobile device without needing cloud connectivity.
Voysis’ roughly 35-person team, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Boston, USA, has scaled extensively over the past two years, as a result of our USD$8m (£6.16m) in Series A capital from Polaris Partners in 2017.
What benefits are retailers seeing from adopting voice technology such as yours?
Amazon has demonstrated that voice is an excellent fit for the ordering and reordering of every day items. However, we believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The majority of e-commerce shopping interactions happen on mobile devices and, beyond that, 90% off all retail transactions still happen in stores. Our customers can bring natural language interactions into their mobile apps, website, and other hardware devices to enhance product discovery, purchasing, and customer service. That experience can even extend into the store itself, where use cases like quickly locating products using your voice are just scratching the surface. At it's core, voice allows you to have more intelligent interactions with the technology around you, which enables our customers to get their customers to the right answers and results faster.
Voysis

John Fitzpatrick, VP Product & Engineering, Voysis

Do you view the likes of Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home devices as competition or part of a separate vertical?
Smart speakers are a natural home for voice technology, where one of the first 'killer' voice apps was voice-driven music listening. And shopping is proving to be another powerful application for smart speakers. But if you look at the bigger opportunity for voice commerce, all retailers and brands are taking an omnichannel approach to their customer experience and voice has a role to play in all of those interactions. This same reality applies to most industries, including banking, restaurants, and healthcare, to name a few.
Why are some retailers struggling to integrate voice interfaces into their online offerings? 
Voice is new, and a lot of companies are weary of being the guinea pigs for the latest technologies. But, similar to the introduction of the smart phone, if the last few years have shown us anything, voice is here to stay. So, similar to the transition to a mobile-centric world, the companies that embrace innovation are going to be the ones to shape the future and they'll also benefit from it earlier than the rest. The technology is ready to be applied, so there's nothing standing in anyone's way on that front.
What does the future have in store for Voysis? 
We recently announced a pretty momentous change in how voice technology is built and delivered with Voysis Embedded WaveNet. It will dramatically reduce the cost of voice service delivery and allow us to offer extremely natural experiences. So, we're excited to put this breakthrough technology out into the wild and play our part in making the next generation of voice experiences that much better.