Voice control may be the biggest music leap since Hi-Fi—and more Collision 2017 - 8th May 2017

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by Nathan Mattise

NEW ORLEANS—Just as "space" may not be the first thing to come to mind about New Orleans, "tech" typically doesn't arrive high on the list, either. But for three days every spring in recent years, the Collision Conference has aimed to change that by raising the national profile of Silicon Bayou. The US-spinoff of the European Web Summit event gathers a wide variety of disciplines—national security to space, performance enhancing drugs to autonomous vehicles—and an even wider array of personalities.

Throughout this year's event, attendees could hear and interact with chief executives from the likes of Coca-Cola, Amazon, Cisco, Facebook, Wells Fargo, and Bitmoji. Shark Tank's Chris Sacca sat on the same stage as future NFL Hall of Famer Terrell Owens, WWE legend Ken Shamrock, olympic swimmers, and presidents of organizations from GLAAD to Twitch. Look for some interviews onsite over the course of the next week (not so subtle hints available here and here), but we had a pair of quick highlights stand out.

The world’s most dangerous (business) man

“What’s a UFC Hall of Famer doing at a tech conference?”

Somehow Collision moderator Richard Forde didn’t lead with that question. But there on center stage—following a talk on billion-dollar startups with Taboola and preceding a national security discussion with the deputy assistant attorney general for the US—sat fighting legend Ken Shamrock. The since-retired “Most Dangerous Man” still looks like he’d be a handful in his 50s, but he focuses on a much different kind of competition these days.

“It’s amazing, the fight in these pitches,” Shamrock said of his new life running a non-profit, doing speaking engagements, and slowly becoming a venture capitalist. “It’s almost like being in the ring measuring up your opponent. It’s all about leveraging yourself for a good business deal.”

Shamrock’s talk veered more toward biography than business insights, but he delighted old fans in attendance with behind-the-scenes tales of his upbringing, UFC career, and high-profile transition to the then-WWF (though he loved fighting, “my purpose was always to support my family,” Shamrock said. “UFC wasn’t able to pay me what I needed at that time”). But the “wait, why’s he here?” feeling went away when Shamrock discussed the transition out of being a spotlight sparrer.

“When you start to come to the end of your career, the end of the tunnel gets brighter and you panic because you’re used to a certain lifestyle,” Shamrock admitted. “Most people after about five years are broke—they’re used to a lifestyle, but they aren’t making the same money.

"But I know I’m worth something because popularity is worth something,” he continued. “So I remember thinking, ‘How can I monetize this and make money off what I’ve created over the years? I looked at Foreman with the grill or Shatner with Priceline, and I said, ‘I could do that.’”

Though he wouldn’t delve into specifics, Shamrock told the crowd he connected with good advisors and has been able to leverage his celebrity into working with companies in exchange for equity and partnerships for his still growing Shamrock, Inc. “It has been about knowing my limitations and getting others involved when I know I’m short,” he says. As for whether this second act can reach even greater heights than his first, Forde put it to Shamrock quite bluntly—do you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?

“Anybody that wants to do things or create things, there’s never a limitation,” Shamrock replied. “I don’t necessarily shoot for the stars, but it’s not like I don’t think of getting there. For me, I’m not going to be happy with achieving a goal and stopping; I’m going to achieve and then reach for another.”

Hey [Alexa/Google/et al], play “Freebird”

While we attend plenty of conferences around Ars, we don't tend to present at many. But at both years of the nascent Collision, I've been asked to take the stage multiple times as moderator. In 2017, that meant judging pitches (alongside a LeapMotion exec and the "mean guy" from Canada's version of Shark Tank) during the prelims of the conference's startup tournament, talking music festivals of the future with the planners behind Bonnaroo and our Conde colleagues at Pitchfork, and diving into the niche of voice assistance as it pertains to our music listening experience.

Sitting alongside industry veterans from Spotify (Ian Geller, global head of hardware), Pandora (Geoff Snyder, vice president), and Amazon (Ben Shepherd, global head of Alexa music), it shocked me how much the music industry thinks about what feels like a narrow voice assistant use case. But both Pandora and Spotify cited noticeably high engagement with Alexa for their users. Spotify's Geller quickly noted the gigantic potential "of a technology that anyone—regardless of age or technical capability—can engage with" (including his 70-something mother-in-law), and he said voice assistance may open up music listening to the masses unlike any technology we've seen in decades.

"Before Alexa, voice was a gimmick. You needed to know exactly how to use it, the right words to use, and if you didn’t know the script, it didn’t work," he said. "It wasn’t worth the effort, but Alexa was the first one where it was real, where it was almost like magic. We’ve been waiting for an iPhone moment for the connected home, and it seems like voice is the thing—it’s allowing people to engage with music in their homes in ways they haven’t since the Hi-Fi stereo system became possible."

Snyder echoed the sentiment, noting his 7-year-old gets into the car and often shouts "Alexa, play the Moana soundtrack" from the backseat without thinking twice. Obviously, implementation of Alexa hasn't quite reached that level of permeability, but the panel assembled at Collision indicated we're heading that way: someday we'll be able to ask Alexa at home to queue up a song we heard in a car three weeks ago, or to ask Alexa to continue a playlist "for exercise" (personalized based on prior user actions, of course) from the living room to your phone as you go on a jog.

Today, however, the first step seems to be training the platform to deal better with the inherent ambiguity introduced by a voice command versus inputs via text or full-screen UIs. "We can list 20 things on a screen to ask, 'What did you mean?' but with voice we need to be hyperaccurate," Geller noted. “'Play 'Help' by The Beatles,' that’s easy. 'Play The Beatles,' more ambiguous but still pretty easy. 'Play The Beatles song that was no. 1 in 1968,' now that becomes harder and harder."

Even Amazon's Shepherd willingly admitted this qualifies as the biggest limitation with Alexa, and voice assistance in general, today. But as the platform continues to partner with services such as Pandora or Spotify, the amount of data it can call upon to better understand natural language queries grows and grows. "One of the biggest challenges remains multi-faceted search queries," Shepherd said. "No one is going to type into a box, 'I want the first live version of this album,' but in voice you can do that. At Amazon we often say, 'It’s day one,' but for voice it is day zero. This is really in its infancy, and lots of technology will get better in the next few years, growing rapidly smarter."

Listing image by Nathan Mattise

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(ARS Technica)