Pullstring CEO Oren Jacob: “Alexa, order me 100 gallons of chocolate ice cream”

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2017

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Oren Jacob, former CTO of film studio Pixar and founder of computer conversation startup Pullstring to talk about the new age of voice technology and talking Barbie (2:30), how the Amazon Echo ended the family shopping trip (7:30), his years at Pixar (12:00), building Mrs Potatohead (13:30), how a stuffed bunny inspired his startup (14:45), cold-calling speech experts (18:30), doing market research in a tent (20:30), raising the first round of venture capital (23:30), the difficulty of doing speech recognition for children (25:30), the many tech revolutions making voice systems possible (28:45), turning algorthms into characters (36:00), whether bots kill jobs (40:00), expecting too much from machines (46:00), and the importance of a voice assistant elegantly saying “I don’t know” (47:45).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Yo, technology. What is it all about? Welcome, welcome to Danny in the Valley. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you for the reviews and ratings. Please do keep them rolling in. We have a great show for you this week. We're going to be talking about voice and voice assistants like Siri and Alexa and Google Home, etc.
0:23.5	This is the new big battle for supremacy, the battle royale, that has broken out between the top technology companies.
0:31.3	You can understand why.
0:33.0	If you get, imagine just getting rid of your touchscreen, your computer, your keyboard.
0:40.0	And you could just simply ask your technology to do things and it would work and it would, you know, book your holiday and order your food, etc.
0:49.1	Whichever company figures that out is going to make lots and lots and lots of money.
0:52.8	And we have the perfect
0:54.1	guests to talk about all of that this week. Orin Jacob is here. And Orrin is the founder of a
1:00.8	company called PullString. They are a computer conversation company. They've been around for
1:07.0	six years. They do tons of interesting stuff, ranging from the system behind
1:12.5	upcoming hologram Barbie, which I bet you didn't know about, to chat boss for Call of Duty
1:19.3	and all kinds of interesting stuff. Before pull string, Oren was the CTO of Pixar and was
1:26.6	there for 20 years, worked on lots of interesting movies like Toy Story and Bugs Life and Finding Nemo.
1:34.6	Anyhow, he's been at this voice thing now for six years at PullString.
1:40.9	He's got a lot of very interesting and informed views.
1:45.0	I think you'll find it very interesting.
1:47.3	I know I did.
1:48.5	Without further ado, Lauren.
1:54.3	The company was formed in late spring, early summer of 2011.
2:01.6	We're not here in 2017.
2:03.6	I used to have a different name.
2:04.6	We started as Toy Talk and then became company known as Pull String a year and change ago.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Will Morley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Will Morley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.