Hype kills value, and other hard lessons from veteran voice app developers

At Transform, an AI-focused event held by VentureBeat in Mill Valley, California, Google VP Scott Huffman, who is in charge of engineering teams for Google Assistant, shared some insights into what it takes to create lasting experiences with voice assistants. For example, becoming part of a person's daily routine helps drive adoption, and Google Assistant commands like "Create a reminder" or "Play music" are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than a Google search query. Huffman did a great job of sharing unique insights from a platform perspective, but that's just one side of the story. On the other side are a host of developers, startups, and service providers making their own third-party experiences that work alongside Google Assistant or Alexa. Below is some tried-and-true advice for successful voice computing from three veterans in the industry. Perhaps more than any other portion of the tech industry, bots and artificial intelligence have made great strides in the past few years, while simultaneously suffering from overmarketed and even false claims.