Using Voice Technology to Create Interactive Entertainment

Steve Adubato goes One-on-One with Kevin Cornish, Co-Founder of Conversive, from the Amazon Alexa VOICE Summit at NJIT, to discuss how the entertainment industry is using voice technology to create an interactive experience for its users.

9/27/18 #2169

Excerpt:

"Hi, this is Steve Adubato coming to you from the campus of NJIT - that's the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Why are we here? This is, in fact, the Voice Summit, sponsored by Amazon Alexa. You've got about 2,500 folks from all over the country, programmers, people involved in something called artificial intelligence, all about voice. What does voice mean in our lives today? What could, and what will, voice mean in our lives tomorrow? That's what the people are here talking about at NJIT, at this Voice Summit. We'll be interviewing those folks and bringing everything you've ever wanted and needed to know about voice to you right now. [digital ringing] [music playing] Hey, have you heard the news? It's gonna be awful. You can't be sure whose side someone's on. Whatever happens, we all need to have our stories straight. We can't let him get away with it. It's too much. We have to think about our futures. Maybe we should hear from someone with a little perspective. What do you think? Should I tell the truth? Or protect myself? Tell the truth. Thank you. Kevin Cornish, who's the Founder of an organization called Conversive, which is? So Conversive is a conversation engine for building face-to-face conversations. So imagine putting a face on Alexa. And in the entertainment space, imagine having conversations with characters from your favorite shows. This is the API that allows all that to happen. API? From... yeah. What is 13 Reasons Why? So 13 Reasons Why is Netflix's biggest show. And what they wanted to do for the... to help launch the newest season, was give fans a chance to step inside the world of the show. And to do that, we enabled this experience where you're getting FaceTime calls from the characters. So it's a Voice-First movie, it's set during the show, and it treats you just like you're one of the kids on the show. Okay. An 18 year old watching the show, he or she's watching it, but then they're interacting with the show how? So the day before the show launched, there had been a whole media build-up to this new season. There had been all kinds of open-ended questions from the season before, big questions about what's going to happen in the next season. They get... they find a... they get a link on... find it on Snapchat or in an Instagram Story, they click, and then they start getting a FaceTime call from Tony. No! The star of the show. And Tony's telling them there's a lot of crazy stuff going on, whatever happens, stay out of it. And then over the course of the next ten minutes, they're gonna be getting..."