Emerson Sklar is the Chief Evangelist at Bespoken, a company with a popular toolkit for testing and monitoring voice apps. We start by unpacking the fundamentals of testing and the various types, from unit and end-to-end testing to continuous and usability performance testing. Emerson talks us through the product features of Bespoken and how it works. We discover the surprising fact that their system uses text-to-speech to generate audio, which is then fed to a virtual Alexa on the servers to generate a response. They are thus able to modify the input in order to measure what effect that has on the output.

Imagine if voice technology could be used to diagnose diseases! This could be a reality if voice tech is used to identify non-speech sounds, such as coughs. This focus is of particular interest at the moment as the world's governments rally resources to protect populations against COVID-19. This is one area of focus for this week's guest, Prof. Ami Moyal, President, Afeka Tel Aviv College of Engineering, Israel. Prof. Ami also talks about the future of voice technology and what we should be teaching children for them to be successful in the world.

David Borish is Chief Creative at PRIMO AI, a New York startup that recommends the highest performing Speech-to-text (STT) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) services for a particular dataset and geographical region. We discover what the biggest problem with speech to text systems is today, and why trying to solve it by hiring data scientists can be prohibitively expensive. We also discuss the advantages of acquiring a technology patent, why David chose to recently enter the voice space, and the approach he takes when selecting his next entrepreneurial challenge. David is a seasoned startup veteran who believes passionately in the future of voice, and our conversation contains many valuable lessons to take away.