Alexa play “The Decoded Podcast by GS1 US”. Voice controlled AI devices like the Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant have become common household items. Is voice becoming the ultimate computer or interface, or is it? Find out on today’s episode as we sit down with Jon Stine, the executive director of the Open Voice Network, to discuss the emerging use cases and growing potential of voice. From the episode: “Voice is going to be a tremendous enterprise tool and a tool for societal development is value when it can be trusted.” Guest: Jon Stine, Executive Director of the Open Voice Network Episode recorded September of 2020. Join host Reid Jackson as he cracks the code on emerging tech through conversations with thought leaders at the top of the digital disruption game. Reid and the GS1 US innovation team explore the intersection of standards and emerging tech, and how the two together can solve the business problems of the future. The identification of everything makes anything possible! The views, information, or opinions expressed during DeCoded by GS1 US podcast series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of GS1 US, its employees or member companies. The podcast series is provided by GS1 US as a convenience and does not constitute or imply an endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by GS 1 US of any of the identified companies, products, or services. GS1 US does not warrant or guarantee any of the products or services identified here, nor does it assume any legal liability or responsibility with respect to them.
About Jon Stine
Jon Stine is the Executive Director of The Open Voice Network (OVN), a non-profit global association working now to bring standards to the world of artificial intelligence-enabled voice assistance. The OVN is a Directed Fund of The Linux Foundation.
He brings to this role more than 30 years of global leadership in the commerce and technology industries.
Jon’s retail industry knowledge was first shaped in the womenswear apparel business, as he headed sales of a well-known national brand to leading US department and specialty stores. In 2000, he joined the Intel Corporation to create and head its first global outreach to the retail and consumer goods industry.
He joined Cisco Systems in late 2006, and later headed Cisco’s North America consulting practice for retail-CPG. In 2014, he returned to Intel as the Global Enterprise Sales General Manager for the retail, hospitality, and consumer goods industries. He stepped away from Intel in 2019 to build The Open Voice Network.
Through the years, Jon has worked directly with customers across the Americas, Western and Central Europe, India, China, and Japan.
He resides in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Reid Jackson (00:00):
Welcome to the DeCoded Podcast, presented by GS1 US, where today's thought leaders help us crack the code on emerging technologies. Hello everyone, I'm Reid Jackson, Senior Director of Corporate Development at GS1 US. On today's episode, we're going to be discussing voice. Our guest for today is Jon Stine. Jon is the Executive Director of The Open Voice Network, which is a nonprofit organization. John, welcome to the show.
Jon Stine (00:31):
Reid, thanks so much for having me. Delighted to be here.
Reid Jackson (00:32):
Really excited to be speaking with you today, Jon. This whole voice thing, we can take it in a thousand different directions. Even my kids were like, "Hey, can I be on the podcast today?" We can talk about so much, but before we really get into the topic of voice, can you just share a little bit more about The Open Voice Network, who you are, what you guys do and what your overall mission is?
Jon Stine (00:53):
Sure. Let me just give the high-level overview, and again, hey, listeners, you can go to www.openvoicenetwork.org and get all this information. But bottom line, Reid, very quickly, we're a nonprofit 503(c)(6) nonprofit industry association, a directed fund affiliated with the Linux Foundation. But what we're about is really two or three things. The first is bringing standards, broadly defined right now, bringing standards to the world of voice assistance. A second thing is taking a look at ethical use guidelines because this whole voice thing, as you and I are going to be talking about, is not only what we necessarily, the words we hear, but there's a whole lot of other things involved there.
Jon Stine (01:42):
Then taking a look at the business use cases. Where does invoice create value? Nonprofit independently governed, independently funded, working with the Linux Foundation, The Open Voice Network.
Reid Jackson (01:54):
Awesome. Well, thank you again for taking the time to speak with us today. I know the listeners are very interested in hearing more. Let's get back to voice. Voice is sound. We all have our Alexis and our Siris and Hey Googles and all those things. Right now, for some folks, it's going off in their homes or cars. But we're also still not to where we thought we would be. At least the folks that I speak to, and even myself, you see the movie Ironman, and he's got J.A.R.V.I.S, and he's speaking to J.A.R.V.I.S, and it's just so fluid and intuitive. Why aren't we there yet? Or will we be there very shortly?
Jon Stine (02:39):
There's a number of reasons Reid why J.A.R.V.I.S isn't sitting in every home, but will it be long before that happens? Is it three, five, seven years? I can tell you that, when you take a look at what's in labs and what people are talking about in developing, the big platforms, the ecosystem, that's where it's headed, but why aren't we there? We can look around and say, well, gosh, it plays music for me, or it gives me some recipes or tells my kids jokes, but this is not something I'd spent a whole lot of money on in my business. It's probably three big reasons, Reid. Number one, the technology has to emerge. The technology has to develop. We're in the early days. People say, "Well, hell voices and happened."
Jon Stine (03:26):
Well, the internet hadn't happened in 1993, '94, '95. Mobile hadn't really happened when you and I were using our Nokia flip phones. When [crosstalk 00:03:39].
Reid Jackson (03:39):
StarTAC really. It was the StarTAC phone. Let's be honest, it was the Motorola StarTAC.
Jon Stine (03:45):
Gotcha. I'm with you. Those were early days, and things that happened, we had such things as standards come into play, and you can't underestimate the impact. You can't underestimate the impact of an ecosystem that was built and created due to the implementation of standards. Then that leads to more innovation, and that leads to more development, and you have things that all of a sudden, you've got search engines, you've got this and you've got that, and you have, in say 25 years of the internet, something that's completely revolutionized society and business.
Reid Jackson (04:24):
Yeah. There's no doubt about that. The standards do help us get to that ubiquitous adoption. We're huge. GS1 US, Global Standard, One Global Standard, and standards are different for different things. You have technology standards, you have communication standards, you have identification standards, and going on, but let's talk about this a little bit. Voices, essentially, NLP, natural language processing, but there's a secret sauce to that. How do we get around the developers putting in their time and their intellectual properties? What's the angle there? Or can we still have standards and allow for this secret sauce to still take place?
Jon Stine (05:17):
Well, I think we can have standards and still have that secret sauce. Reid, you take a look at the internet, you take a look at mobility, you take a look at all kinds of technical innovations, heavens, even going back to the width of a railroad gauge. Standards, then create opportunity for commercial differentiation, commercialization innovation for secret sauce. Think for a moment about the elements. I might add artificial intelligence to that NLP. Voices today is a combination of NLP and AI. In that combination, the percentage of that combination differs according to what you need to do and where need to go. But if you begin to break down the elements of, call it an independent voice assistant, or independent personal assistant, and you take a look at all of those, the proprietary assistance, the new growing classification of open or independent assistance, and what we're finding right now, and the way that you develop standards in a place like this, common across a lot of technologies, you find those common components.
Jon Stine (06:26):
You find those small pieces that fit into a lot of different places. Our hypothesis, and it's a hypothesis that's been followed previously by a lot of other standards efforts is, if we can begin to identify those components, maybe it's interfaces, maybe it's data going in and out. We're working on that right now, taking a look at it, we'll be able to then create a set of building blocks, and forgive me the trademark people here, but the Lego blocks, if you will, of voice assistance. Reid, you could take some of the standard pieces, you could take Google's, natural language understanding. Their engine's tremendous. Tremendous products. You could start piecing them together in a purpose built way. You have standards which could begin to enable interoperability across platforms. You also set in motion an ecosystem that says, oh, well, I could take that little building block and I could give it some secret sauce.
Jon Stine (07:31):
Now that's going to be the best in class for that given capability. That's the thing that sets an industry on fire, that sets an industry in motion, that sets an industry toward greater innovation and growth. That's what happened in internet, that's what's happening in mobility. We want to set that in motion for voice.
Reid Jackson (07:51):
Yeah. I want to dig into that a little bit deeper. You mentioned Google, and we'll talk about Apple and Amazon. But before we get to that, because I think that's going to get really juicy there, what are the primary use cases today that people are leveraging voice? The big hitters, the main stakes.
Jon Stine (08:16):
This is a great question, Reid, and let's just go back and forth on this. I'd love to hear your thoughts as well, because most of us understand voice as the smart speaker devices that are in our home. That they play music, they tell jokes to our kids. We may be order something, but most likely not. But if we think about where voice assistance, separate voice assistance from smart speakers, software, hardware, and you realize that voice assistance is now in monthly active use on some 500 million Android/Google devices, including smartphones, then you start to realize, oh, this is a whole different world than what I may have understood as the realm of smart speakers. It's probably three or four big areas of let's call them enterprise use cases, where businesses can make money off this stuff. One is simply going to be in the operational side, and it's something we've been doing as a society for years, and that is using voice bots in the call center, using voice bot to answer simple asked questions. It's a common thing for us, and yet-
Reid Jackson (09:35):
That's come a long way from the '80s and '90s.
Jon Stine (09:36):
Come a long way.
Reid Jackson (09:36):
A lot of times today, most people don't even realize that they're actually talking to a software bot when they're on these calls, or when they're in a chat.
Jon Stine (09:53):
We don't know. Indeed, some of the research would suggest that well, heaven sakes, I like that better than when I was waiting on a call to talk to a human who may not have had the answer. Customer satisfaction is generally higher with a voice bot. Again, let's use commerce as examples. An industry we're all familiar with here. You begin to think of, not only can it tell ... it can tell me the store hours or this and that, but it could also tell me when my order is ready. It could tell me what is available. It could tell me the status of my shipment as we move into greater and greater digital shopping, which creates questions about when is it coming, how will it come, where do I pick it up, and all that, so kind of the operational side, the efficiency of just voice bots.
Jon Stine (10:49):
We're also seeing that, and this is something that's below the water line. Not a lot of people paying attention to it, Reid, is in manufacturing and process manufacturing of now you have, let's say a connected factory or a connected set of processes that can use voice to give outputs. Hey, there's a problem in this area, or there's a problem in this area. I know a fellow who was working on a connected vineyard concept. Let's say the vineyard manager steps into the area, has the smartphone to the ear, connects in, and now the soil is giving him or her a report. We're a little dry over here. Doable.
Reid Jackson (11:40):
Yeah. In essence, what you're doing there is you're utilizing an IoT environment sensors, and then utilizing the sensors as data. Then the person is connecting via their phone or smart device or of some sorts. The data is then being, what's the right way to ... put into an audible response and be a little bit more intuitive there with providing information back.
Jon Stine (12:14):
Data is communicated. Now, let's say you have smart buds in your ears, or you're just simply holding the smart device and you're in a vineyard, which would you rather do is simply listen or trying to tap in information on a smartphone screen to find the application while the sun is over your shoulder and you can't quite see it. Perhaps that can be in English, that can be in Spanish, that could be in a Russian. Whatever is the easiest language for the vineyard manager, for instance.
Reid Jackson (12:46):
That's amazing. I haven't heard of that example yet. That's really cool.
Jon Stine (12:50):
You think of our input and output in the systems. Reid, I was in sales and sales management for a number of years in the technology business. You say, hey, sales person, why haven't you entered the customer data into the system?" Well, I had the meeting, then I had to drive two hours and then I had this and that. I had that. What do you want me to do Jon? Type it in while I'm driving?" Well, of course not. Well, what if you could simply speak it?
Reid Jackson (13:26):
Let's talk about that real fast, because, not to call out any one vendor, but I've been hearing these advertisements for at least 10 years, at least, of this digital assistant. As we're driving down the highway, it's hey, whoever, schedule a call for me or cancel my two o'clock, or please send a text memo. I can tell you that I've tried and tried. It's gotten a little better with some of the ones I've noticed as of the last year without saying who they are, but I tell you the other ones, I got so frustrating. It's no, I didn't say that. Voice to text was like, oh my gosh, it's safer while I'm driving, but that's not what I said. What are still the challenges?
Jon Stine (14:21):
You're so spot on, and there's a number of challenges there. One is, unfortunately, and you've seen it, I've seen it, we've all seen it is the marketing departments run well ahead of the reality.
Reid Jackson (14:33):
Okay, fair enough.
Jon Stine (14:36):
We've all seen it, and it's painful and you wish it didn't happen. The hype cycles go. The hype just goes and oh, it could do, it could be, look at this demo. Well, but the reality is, is that the ability recognize is continuing to improve. I look in the mirror and say, "Be patient Jon." It's like, oh, I don't want to be patient. I want it now. I want J.A.R.V.I.S now, but be patient, it is coming. It is on its way. Honestly, Reid, the fact that we're in the early days, going back to an early part of our conversation, the fact we are in the early days of voice does give us the opportunity to shape the voice experience, the voice ecosystem, the voice industry in ways to let's say, benefit, all parties. Lift all boats. Whether in a row boat or a yacht, to lift all boats. We are in those early days. I wish we didn't have to be patient, but yeah, we have to be. it's much as we were with the internet, much as we were with mobility, much as we were heavens with mimeograph machine back in the day.
Reid Jackson (15:55):
Is it one or two things? Is it a handful of a lot of things that's holding this back from making this ... We talked about standards, but I often take it for granted. I only speak one language. I have friends that speak three and five languages, and I'm always super impressed by that. When I travel internationally, I tend to learn a couple of sentences. But when I think about just the dialects of India or China, and then it's like, I grew up in New York City Area. When I go home, we talk like this, a little bit different, but now I live down here in the South, and it is different down here too. There's a lot that goes on with dialects. Is that part of it? Is it compute?
Jon Stine (16:46):
I think you said a well Reid, there's an awful lot of a lot. There's an awful lot of a little, an awful lot of a lot. One of the things to this, is let's just call it the broad issue of inclusivity and the ability to hear everyone. Now, I grew up in the Midwest, Fort Wayne, Indiana, so I speak what some people would call Cincinnati TV announcer. I have that flattened Midwestern, I don't know if it's an accent. I'm understood by nearly my most, if not all, voice assistants, but some of my friends down in Birmingham, Alabama, don't speak Cincinnati TV announcer. Good friends in Boston, they're wicked smart, but they don't speak Cincinnati TV announcer. Then we go around the world, I'm working with a great new friend, Maarten Lens-FitzGerald in the Netherlands, and he's working on a thing called Voice Commons.
Jon Stine (17:52):
You and I we're Americans. Well, dutch is Dutch. Oh no, there's seven, eight, nine, 10 different dialects.
Reid Jackson (18:02):
I think they say Dutch is the hardest language to learn.
Jon Stine (18:06):
Each one of these takes a dataset of significant size to train the natural language understanding, to train the algorithms, to train. It is an issue of datasets and a focus upon training, and training that is inclusive across all these different dialects in length.
Reid Jackson (18:33):
A little bit of a different question here for you. With the popularity of voice and society accepting it. These smart speakers are everywhere now. Amazon has done such a tremendous job of infiltrating our society with these things. I can tell you that I was against them and now I really find them helpful in a lot of different ways. We've hooked up a lot of routines to it and scripts to it and connected things and try stuff. The wife and the kids and everybody loves it. Do you think that there's a possibility, because of the adoption and the use, people will change the way they do things? I know that when I travel, I start to naturally get the accent of the local place that I'm working in or visiting. Do you think that there's an opportunity that society might actually reduce all of our dialects so that we can get more adoption of some of this voice solutions faster? Does my question make sense to you?
Jon Stine (19:39):
The question makes a lot of sense, Reid, and the answer is, gosh, that's making me think in a whole different way. I do think that voice assistance and the ubiquity of voice assistance, because not only, and Amazon's done a tremendous job with smart speakers, but voice assistance in smartphones, voice assistance in automobiles, and you know there are more voice assistants on phones and automobiles than there are smart speakers. It's all around us. Now, you added in the refrigerators and remote controls for televisions and this and that and whatever else, it is going to be ubiquitous, ambient, everywhere, will speak to our world. Yeah. But what does that mean? What does that mean in terms of behavior? One, I think it's going to increase our inpatients.
Jon Stine (20:40):
If ease and convenience is the current number one value proposition across all kinds of industries, I want it, and I want it now, I'm not going to wait, where waiting too long on the internet is measured in milliseconds, voice only can speed that up. That's one thing. A second is just the ease of access. Now, are we there yet? No. Have we reached J.A.R.V.I.S yet? No. Are we impatient about that? Of course, we are, but just to say yes, Reid, your retailer, would you like to have a reorder of last week's orders plus probably a six pack of beer because the Giants are going to be planned this week and you're going to have a party? Yes. Just to say yes. Ship it to my home. Thanks. Put it on my bill. Thanks. The ease and convenience and speed, and then if I have to sound more intelligent than a standard Midwesterner, to speak to my device and get there, I might do so.
Reid Jackson (21:54):
Yeah. It would be funny if we all started talking like robots so that the robot could understand us easier.
Jon Stine (22:00):
Hey, Google, send me things. Yeah.
Reid Jackson (22:05):
That'd be funny. All right. Well, let's move on, man. I'm just looking at the clock, and I'm like, man, there are still so many things I want to get to, but real fast, if you can touch upon it, is there anything that's top of mind for you as you see, like this is a couple of years down the road, but work is already going into it and it's going to blow people's minds on use cases. You blew my mind with the vineyard use case. I hadn't even thought of that, but that would be super cool if I put on my earbuds in the morning and I'm walking around the facility and it says, "Hey, this area of the vineyard, we need a lot more water." But in this area it's like, "Buddy, we're drowning over here. We're not thirsty anymore. We're bloated." That's really cool. Are there any other use cases you see coming down the pipeline?
Jon Stine (22:48):
I think we're going to see a real expansion. IoT, AI, and then voice interface. I have some friends who are futurists. They actually do that for a living, an amazing thing they do. One of them said, "You know, Jon, in the future, all AI will be conversational. Wherever you have artificial intelligence, the input and output will be voice. It will be the easiest way." You take sensors, you take AI, you take machine learning, and now you put voice to it, endless, endless things in front of us there. In systems, in manufacturing, in vineyards, voice input and output into data analysis is going to be a whole area. The second, which I think is going to be absolutely fascinating, and you see it with the potential of Amazon Prime, you see the potential of Walmart Plus, is going to be, in the commerce industry, is going to be from the kitchen replenishment.
Jon Stine (23:54):
Now you have a talkative brain, a talkative friend there in your kitchen helping you with recipes, helping you with ideas, telling you the time, playing you the music, maybe giving you some YouTube videos, or whatever else, and now you just say, gosh, I'm a little short on milk. Why should we have ... and now ordering in a quick of a second replenishment and taking this whole digital grocery thing that's happening and putting it on steroids.
Reid Jackson (24:26):
Yeah. That is a big focus area for us here at GS1 US, especially the team that I'm on in Corp dev/innovation, a lot of digital commerce, grocery is a huge part of where we focus. We're the issuing body for global trade identification numbers, your G tins.
Jon Stine (24:48):
[crosstalk 00:24:48] center of that.
Reid Jackson (24:49):
Yeah. We're always working on the physical and digital worlds and your digital twins. Let's just talk a little bit more about that. I've seen it already. I was at CES back in January of 2020 before everything changed in the globe, and it was super exciting and super cool. I came home and actually implemented a lot of voice commanding IoT type solutions. Turn on the lights, turn on the TV, start the car, all these types of things that I saw, I'm like, let me try them out. Let me see how easy, and some of them were like, wow, they were game changing, and it worked great. Others I'm like, nah, this really doesn't work. But my concern about the replenishment is, how does the voice know what I really want to replenish? Say milk, is it going to give me Welsh Farms milk, or is it going to give me Kroger milk, or is it going to give me Acme milk?
Reid Jackson (25:50):
Who makes the decision on the milk? Is it 1%, 2%, skim milk, ultra-fat? Where does it get the intelligence to do that, and who owns that?
Jon Stine (26:03):
It's a huge, it's the question, Reid, and you couldn't have said it any better. Reid, you've got a digital twin, we all have digital twins, and we know that because there's this assortment, there's this actually, it's a huge pile of data that exists about our behaviors. In your home, maybe you guys drink 1% and you prefer from a certain brand. Well, there's a knowledge about that. Again, talking about natural language processing understanding and artificial intelligence, the two come together, the data around Reid's family, and let's say you have your own AI and your own ownership of your own data, one of the issues that comes into play, then there is a context that says for milk, Reid's family wants 1% from, let's say Kroger. That's known.
Jon Stine (27:10):
Perhaps, based upon that data ownership and that context, history, preferences, interests, needs, when it's time for replenishing milk, which may be identified by either the last time you purchase it or the days between your regular purchases, so every five days, Reid's family buys milk, it's the fourth day, maybe it's time, or sensors in your refrigerator, possible. It's IoT, it's sensors, it's data, it's artificial intelligence, and it's voice speaking to you asking questions back to the AI, and then listening for your desires. However, now, this is the setup, but still, Reid, your questions of, who owns the data? What is shipped to me, all that we've got to figure out, because right now, it's probably largely dependent upon the platform you use, and whether you are explicitly saying, take me to X retailer or saying, gosh, it's time to order milk.
Reid Jackson (28:31):
Yeah. I'll tell you, and in today's day and age, the average consumer, the person home, everyone's aware that their data is being sold and monetized. There's a couple of big players out there that are doing it all. I often ask people, I'm like, which smart device in your house do you think collects the most data on you? People say, oh, the smart speaker, the Alexa, or my Roomba or something. I'm like, actually, it's your TV. Your smart TVs are collecting more data than anything. It's pretty overwhelming what they collect, but this is my question back to you. Maybe we don't have an answer today, and I understand that, but I know that you guys are looking at privacy and you're looking at other things, but when I think of IoT, I can tell you, like just in ... we have a great room. It's not a big house. We're very blessed with it. We got five people in this place. We have a kitchen that rolls into a living room and a dining room that hangs off of it.
Reid Jackson (29:37):
There's an Alexa in the kitchen. There's one in the TV. There's a smart speaker that's there as well, because sometimes these things have just accumulated over the years, right?
Jon Stine (29:52):
Sure.
Reid Jackson (29:53):
I win one, somebody got one as a gift. Some of these things are really great and they're like 25 bucks, but now it's like, okay, there's six speakers. Back in the day, you'd have one wireless device in your house. Now, you have 65, 70, 100. Now, I see, today, and then in two or three years, you're not going to have one or two speakers in your house. You're going to have five, 15, 20, 35 speakers that are listening in. Our cell phones are listening in.
Jon Stine (30:26):
Your coffee maker may be listening. Yeah.
Reid Jackson (30:27):
Yeah, or something attached to that. That's where my brain starts to blue screen. It's like, how do you even deal with navigating that traffic, and who's really listening and who's over listening. How does the commerce work for that? Are you guys having conversations at that level today?
Jon Stine (30:49):
We are, and the conversations are difficult because they're extraordinarily complex. You start with a person talking to an assistant. You begin to write on the whiteboard things that ... Privacy. Of course, you go to GDPR, of course, you go to CTTA, you go to NIST, you look at all ... There's this marvelous library of literature on digital privacy. You study all that, but then you begin looking at, oh my goodness, okay, now, what are the elements of privacy when it comes to using your voice to communicate with a machine? The sub components of privacy is that data and data ownership, consent that I give you the right to use my data, is it claiming data from others? My digital twin is all over the world. How do I pull it back and claim it? It's parsing it down back to our process on components interoperability. We're trying to find those core pieces, those core concepts.
Jon Stine (32:07):
Then, how do we apply them to, not just the basics, but Reid, as you said, here's your standard US home with 50, 60, 70 devices and any more coming in, they're all listening, they're all pinging, they're this, they're that, how does privacy data ownership explicit consent, how does all that work? We have a work group on that right now, and that work group has a lot of work behind it and a lot of work in front of it still.
Reid Jackson (32:42):
Yeah. Because we're seeing right now, we've been working with a lot of online markets, and without getting into any specifics on which ones, but there's a lot of fake products that are being sold out there. We have a verified by GS1 offering. It verifies that the product is who we say it is, and this is their global trade identification number. We're seeing a lot of other online markets requiring that, requiring a standard of identification to be utilized. Nike was having big problems on certain markets, and so were Birkenstock and others that are out there. Do you see this problem continuing or being corrected as we move to voice commerce?
Jon Stine (33:43):
It's a great question. It's an issue right now on voice commerce, and that is, we don't have right now. Unlike a G10, which is registered, and everyone knows this G10 refers to this product, this company, etc, according to the many different data fields. There is no registry for destinations in voice. An example of that was just the number of skills and actions that appeared in the voice world offering health advice as the COVID-19 pandemic began to appear.
Jon Stine (34:27):
Now, some of those skills and actions were from very reputable places, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Mount Sinai, etc, but others, there's been an awful lot of forgive me nonsense about, how do you address COVID-19 and/or gain immunity to it? One of the platforms just basically shut all the skills and actions down because there was no way of, if you will, guaranteeing or giving confidence to the user that this was appropriate, this was real, this was now, if you will, fake or counterfeit. This issue is a huge issue in Voice.
Reid Jackson (35:15):
Yeah. You bring up such a good point. I wasn't even really thinking of it that way, but I think of my youngest son, and he's still in grammar school. He'll be doing his homework every now and then. He'll struggle with something, and he'll be like, "Alexa, how do you spell this? Or what's the answer to this?" And I'm like, "Ah, you little cheater. As like, "You got to work around this, you got to work through the work. Learn to work through the work." Now it has me thinking of sometimes it's great, and it's a benefit. It's like a calculator. As long as you can understand the foundations of math, now utilize this. The internet, it's such a great thing, and it brings bad things, but that's the yin and yang of the world.
Reid Jackson (35:56):
That's the universe. Without good, there's not bad. Without bad, there's not good. Light and day, hot and cold, all those types of things. But this is my one question of it. When I do a search on the internet, I get feedback. I'm seeing like, oh, okay, this came from this source, this came from that source. I might want to take a different browser or DuckDuckGo, or something else and do it. But when I ask one of these voice smart speakers, I don't have control over the backend, or maybe there is some, and I'm just not aware of it, of ... I want to know the answer of this only from this location. Maybe I just need to advance myself in how I ask.
Jon Stine (36:42):
Well, to a degree, you want to advance yourself and you need to make your requests more explicit. I'm searching for medical information on this form of, let's say, unfortunately, cancer, and I want to access the experts at the Mayo Clinic. But that's a long and difficult command for any voice assistant. What we see as a real need, and it's an opportunity, and it's something we're studying right now is, how do you create a global registry, almost a domain name system, a voice registry system for voice destinations. If I want to reach Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic, I need to be able to do that, if you will, directly, and with an explicit request to be connected into, say Mayo.
Jon Stine (37:37):
Mayo, please tell me about the following treatments for cancer, or whatever the question may be, and not have the chance to fear, the danger of someone has even claimed Mayo Clinic's name, which could happen to a degree, or just present themselves as a medical advisor. This is a critical part of standardization. Internet didn't happen really without URLs, right? Destinations. You know you are on the Mayo clinic website. This is a trusted source. Well, right now, we don't have that in voice. We have registries within given platforms, but we don't have something that's global, and certainly accepted wherever you go. One of the challenges for us. It gets back to that question of authenticity that you raised. The authenticity of products, the authenticity of providers, the authenticity of those who provide products. We need assurance as a society for that to happen. One of the things we're working on.
Reid Jackson (38:46):
Oh, that's amazing. Jon, I'm just catching the time here, and I'm being reminded. We could go on for hours. I still like, I have so much more I want to talk to you about, so I think we might have to have another episode, but before we close up, is there anything that you just want to get out there that we haven't talked about yet? Just one last little tidbit, a hope for the future or something to educate anybody? Any last words you want to leave?
Jon Stine (39:15):
Reid, thanks, and thanks for this opportunity. It's been a delight. I'm just looking at my watch. I didn't realize how fast the time went. A couple of things for the listeners. Voice, and here's our hypothesis that's really behind the Open Voice Network. Voice is going to be a tremendous enterprise tool and a tool for societal development and value when it can be trusted. Our key phrase is the Open Voice Network is here to make voice what we're the of user trust. You can trust it to hear you. You can trust it to go where you need to go. You can trust it as a tool for business, for creating value, worthy of user trust. Reid, I invite people, catch us on twitter at @openvoicenet, and on the web at www.openvoicenetwork.com. I'd love to hear feedback, love to hear criticism. That's the best way we learn, but it's been a pleasure to talk.
Reid Jackson (40:22):
I can't thank you enough. I wish we had a lot more time, but we'll try to get you back on to talk more about this and some other things. Jon, thank you for making the time today and dropping so much knowledge on us. I'm truly inspired. I commend you and your team, because you're going after a Herculean task. There's so much in it. You put it so well before of just how vast the challenges are and the considerations. There's just so much to this, but I want to thank all of our listeners for tuning in today. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us five stars, and if you didn't tell us why. We're always open to feedback, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss another episode, and we'll be back with more DeCoded, and finding out from today's thought leaders how they're cracking the code on technologies. Thanks everybody, really appreciate it. Have a great day.