How Strong are your Voice First Street Creds?

I've discovered -- and none too early in my existence, I assure you -- that one of the keys to a happy life is authenticity: assiduously rooting out falsehood from your life and insisting on the truth -- first and foremost from yourself, but also from others. What is astonishing is the number of layers of concealment and obfuscation that we somehow manage to put on -- mainly as a result of traumas, tiny and huge -- and that the process of not only maturation, but actually living out one's life -- growing up, growing old, and dying -- is mainly preoccupied with identifying those layers, peeling them off one by one, and then moving on to the next layer, with each peeling getting us closer to what is real, robust, enduring, secure, creative, so that we are free to act in ways that are fulfilling, impactful, and inspiring to others. Along the way -- just to keep things interesting -- we will endure new traumas and put on new layers, but hey, who said that life was anything other than what it wants to be?

Myself, professionally (i.e., how I make my living), I live in the world of "Voice First," a world that used to be called the world of "Speech" or "Human Language Technology," until the focus shifted, thankfully, from talking about technologies (features, capabilities) to talking about experiences (UX, products). That happened in November 2014, when the Amazon Echo -- a true feat on multiple levels (more on this in an upcoming essay) -- burst into the scene. I remember being more than enthralled by this new gizmo that I instantly grasped was far, far more than a mere gizmo, but an earthquake whose tremors were sure to continue to reverberate for a long, long time into the future.  

So, living in the world of "Voice First," it is in there that I get to engage with my authenticity dialectic. That is, my core professional question, if I want to have a happy professional life, is this: is my enthusiasm -- my so-called passion -- for "Voice First" real or is it fake.

My own answer is that yes, I am authentic about "Voice First." I am authentic not because I "like" Voice First or I like to talk about it or write about it, but because I do things that require a lot of work, I do them without seeing a direct return from those actions, with many of those things that I do being chores, sometimes unpleasant, but always wholesome, but chores nonetheless that many people, understandably, don't like to do. And I do them day after day, almost without fail. Crucially, a sign of my authenticity is this: the extent to which I am willing to experiment and to try out new things. I've discovered that you can spot whether or not an enthusiasm is real by the number of ideas that are spawned by that enthusiasm and how long your experimenting lasts. I've been experimenting and trying new things in Voice First literally for years and years (I don't want to show my age by saying decades, but it's really decades), and I expect that I will continue to do so as long as I am active in this space.

And so, when I encounter someone who is an active participant in the Voice First space, and who refers to themselves as such -- for instance, "I am a Voice First evangelist" -- my go-to question, instinctively, is: are they for real or are they a fake? I, of course, allow for sincere exploration: maybe they are attracted by some aspect of the space and this excitement is a bridge to something else, something real, and that is fine and it happens all the time. But then there are those who make claims where they not only declare that they have settled in but that they are so settled in that they are going to help others settle in. On those, I train a special level of scrutiny to determine if they are for real or if they are fake. And since I am deep down an empiricist -- I do respect my gut feel, but I never give it the last word -- I look for simple and direct evidence to help me decide.

So here's what I look for when I'm trying to assess how real or how fake someone who claims to be a serious practitioner of Voice First (let alone an evangelist) is. This includes not only people who research, design, or build and launch skills and actions, but those who talk about Voice First, write about Voice First, build tools for people who build Voice First experiences, etc.

1. Have they deployed an Alexa skill/flash briefing/Google action/Bixby capsule (let's call them Voice First apps) for either themselves or for their business (or both)? If not, then they are faking it. If they claim to be in Voice First and do a podcast, a show, a blog, a newsletter, about Voice First, but they don't have a Voice First app, then they are faking it. If they build tools to help people design, build, Voice First apps but they don't themselves have a Voice First app, then they are faking it. If they have hung up their Voice First consultant shingle and have pumped their website with SEO steroids so that they can score high with people looking for consultants in Voice First marketing or Voice First branding, but they themselves haven't launched a Voice First app, then they are faking it. If they train people on designing for Voice First and they don't have their own Voice First app to showcase, then they are faking it. I think you catch my drift. (Imagine you build web sites, but you yourself don't have a website! Should I take you seriously as a professional website builder. No.)  

2. If they do have a Voice First app (this puts them in the top 5 percent -- total from-ass-pulling move, but I'm just making a point), do they flash the existence of their Voice First app on their social properties? If not, why not? Are they not proud of their work? If not, then what are they doing going around pretending to help others build for value and usability when they themselves can't do it? Or maybe they don't think it's that important to showcase? Ok. Fair enough. But if so, why are they wasting their time and other people's money working on stuff that they don't deem important? Either way, their Voice First street creds get majorly dinged in my eyes.

3. If they have a Voice First app and they do showcase it (this puts them in the top 1 percent), do they go back and see how it's doing?

4. If they do go back to see how it's doing (this puts them in the top 0.1 percent), do they act on what they find out: do they improve it and make it better? If they do, then they are in the top 0.01 percent. Such people are very, very special people. They are real. These are the people that I admire and that impress me the most and that I wish I could bump into more often.

Beyond seriously eating the food they you are cooking and selling, and praising, and helping others cook, there is also the matter of what they do as members of the Voice First community they claim to be proud members of. On that front, here's what I look for.

5. When they encounter a tweet or a Linkedin post from a fellow Voice First traveller, do they glance at it, blink, and move on, or do they like it, comment on it, retweet it/repost it?

6. When they hear that a fellow Voice First traveller scored a success, do they have a sinking feeling, do they wrestle with mixed feelings, or are they happy and glad, knowing that the success of their Voice First mate does nothing less than advance the ball forward for to everyone in the Voice First space -- even if they were their direct competitor.

7. Do they regularly read on Voice First (I mean every day)? And if they do, do they take notes? And if they do take notes, do they review their notes regularly?

8. Do they share articles, facts, insights, with their Voice First community? Are they one of those who thinks that the world is a big but finite pie, and that a slice that goes to someone is a slice that they won't get to eat, or are they one of those people who think in terms of igniting fires of passion?

9. Do they take controversial stands or do they go along to avoid offending a fellow Voice First traveler? Do they conform to some consensus or are they constantly challenging the consensus to make sure that falsehoods and quackeries don't settle in, and to help advance the commity's thinking?

10. Are they part of an organization, a group, an effort, beyond their direct self-interest, that aims to build something that benefits the community at large? If not, do they at least support such organizations? If not, do they at least spread the word about them?

11. Do they help their fellow Voice First travelers whenever they can? And which type of help do they prioritize: helping big name people who are well established (people with several Ks of Twitter followers), flattering people from big brands (Amazon, Google, Apple, Samsung, etc.), or do they prioritize helping those who are unknown, who have nothing to offer them back, but who are earnest and need all the help they can get? In other words, do they "help" to kiss ass or do they help to help?

I'm sure I'm coming across as a moralizing blowhard, etc. -- but frankly, I don' care. What I do care about is this: people wasting their own time pretending to be something that they are not, for whatever reason. Or, if they are not pretending and they are just not doing what they need to do -- because they are lazy, or their imagination hasn't taken them deeper -- then they should try harder. And there is nothing wrong with falling short, and very few things are more meaningful than trying harder, getting better, because, that's what it takes to start converging towards authenticity. Or, as Van Halen put it, and far more eloquently: "You got to roll with the punches to get to what's real."

So, let's collectively up our game. Let's take it to the next level. Let's jump!

Ahmed Bouzid, previously Head of Product at Amazon Alexa, is Founder and CEO of Witlingo, Inc., a McLean, VA-based B2B Saas company that helps brands launch voice first solutions and experiences on platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, and beyond. He is also an Ambassador at The Open Voice Network and an Author at Opus Research.

In addition to inviting you post your comments, Ahmed also invites you to post something about yourself in The Voice First channel here: www.witlingo.com/voicefirst