Wake Up: The Truth About Alexa

A discussion of AI ethics and naming with incredible expert guest panel including Alexa Ard (videographer/producer/editor for Well-Being at The Washington Post), Dr. Alexa Hagerty (Associate Fellow University of Cambridge), and K. Alexa Koenig JD, PhD (Co-executive Director and Adjunct Professor Human Rights Center, UCLA Berkely School of Law.

#names #ethicalAI #alexa #amazonalexa #amazon #equity #corporateresponsibility #humanrights #ethics #women #children #girls

Episode 11 with Joshua Montgomery, Founder of Mycroft AI, the world's largest leading open source voice assistant

One of the few entrepreneurs in the United States to build a gigabit fiber network from scratch, Joshua brings more than 15 years of entrepreneurial experience to the Mycroft project. Joshua’s previous project, Wicked Broadband, has been featured in Wired, ArsTechnica, and Forbes. He is a firm supporter of the open source movement and committed to an open future for AI.

As a product manager for the Autonomous Digital Assistant, Shyamala currently leads the company-wide Ford's Autonomous Digital Assistant innovation for voice and chatbots by owning the roadmap and overall vision and working with cross-functional teams to bring that vision to reality.

She is a self-driven evangelist for UX and voice technology and recognizes the societal and cultural benefits of voice tech evolution. She possesses the insight and knowledge that comes with experience and leadership from her technical, development, and design roles. Her design and research work is presented nationally and internationally to general and field-specific audiences, and she has 18 years of experience designing for mobile, web, desktop, and smart TV interfaces.

Shyamala has more than six years of experience designing voice interfaces for Connected Home Experience, Automotive, and Wearables. Publications: Her work on research into usability, accessibility, speech recognition, multimodal voice user interfaces, and user interfaces for research and educational use cases has been published internationally, and her interviews have been published with several magazines and podcasts, including Forbes, the healthy code, Automotive, and TU-Auto magazines.

Episode 9 with Alexa W.   

Team from Voice Spark Live - Nick Sawka, Emily Banzhaf

About Emily

Emily is a conversation designer, voice designer, one of the hosts of Voice Spark Live, and a member of the Open Voice Network, working to develop standards and ethical guidelines for voice experiences. She was part of the winning team of the Digital Assistant Academy's Hackabot. Before transitioning to the voice field, Emily was a professional violinist, performing all over the world with various ensembles.

About Nick 

Nicholas was recently brought on at Wanderword as their Chief
Evangelist. Nick will represent Wanderword in the US in sales,
networking, gathering product testers as well as improving the
use/onboarding of Fabula, Poptale and entertainment production.

Nick found his passion for Alexa back in 2015 when she was first
released and was part of the initial Beta program for the device. In
2017 he made the jump to development and has been involved with
creating over 400 Alexa Skills. Further, Nicholas has experience with
working on and creating Google Actions. In addition to his love for
Voice First tech he is an experienced Chief Of Operations with a
demonstrated history of working in the military industry, with a
Bachelor’s Degree in Business Management from University of Phoenix.

A must listen: One family's story of how the Alexa wake word turned their world upside down. Warning may be sensitive content for a younger audience

Alexa M shares her experience living with the name Alexa as an adult 

A unique podcast episode with Jeremy Vine and Tim Johns of the BBC!

(with permisson)

Maggie (USA) is the mother of a young daughter formally known as Alexa.   A family's heartbreaking decision to change their child's name as a result of the Amazon wake word Alexa.   "At 2, she was done.  We'll let Amazon keep it." 

True personal story of a family who made the difficult decision to change their young child's name.  Michelle is both and educator and parent living in the U.K.