Voice AI Year in Review 2022 - Voicebot Podcast Ep 289

This is the first of Voicebot's voice AI 2022 year-in-review episodes, and today we focus on consumer solutions. There was no lack of news this year, and industry insiders Peachy-Jean Retizos, Tom Hewitson, and Eric Schwartz join me to break it all down for our sixth annual year-in-review show. Amazon's layoffs that impacted the Alexa and devices groups dominated industry discussions late in the year. However, it was just a few months earlier that a similar move by Google drove industry news cycles. The two tech giants have set the tone for voice AI in consumer solutions since 2014, so the pullbacks were big news. We lead off with these stories and how they are reshaping the voice AI consumer sector. While the moves are generally viewed negatively in the market, we also talk about the positive elements and how they were not exactly unexpected. There is also a discussion about what is getting additional focus in 2023 and where the new paths of growth are emerging. However, the tech giants are not the only game in town. SoundHound became a public company in 2022 and became the first large-scale voice AI pureplay to tap into public financial markets since Nuance. Synthetic speech engines had a notable year in terms of customer growth and acquisitions. And large language models are taking natural language in an entirely new direction, plus we hit on a few other topics. It's been a pretty amazing year with highlights and lowlights, and it was good to get some front-line experts in to hash it all out. Enjoy!