NJIT President on Helping Students Develop Their Technology

Steve Adubato goes on-location to the VOICE Summit at NJIT to talk to New Jersey Institute of Technology's President, Dr. Joel Bloom, who discusses the next wave of voice technology and how NJIT is supporting student developers through grants so they can work on their technology and further their research.

10/12/19 #118

Excerpt:

"Welcome to the Voice Summit here on the campus of NJIT. That is the New Jersey Institute of Technology. For those of you who may not know. This is the largest Voice Summit, not only in the country... we're talking to Joel Bloom in a second, the President of NJIT... maybe in the world. I don't know. Joel, how you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you. And welcome back to Voice Two. Voice Two? Now we have to set this up. We were here last year and I'm gonna say this. There were fewer people, fewer exhibits, there wasn't this much energy, even though it was a big deal. What makes this Voice Summit an even bigger deal? Doctor Bloom? Well obviously, the industry, word of mouth, and people said, "How did you miss it?" Whether they were speaking here in New Jersey, across the country in California or possibly overseas in London. As you probably recall, we had eleven countries here last year, and I think we're over twenty countries are represented. So it's an international conference. It is the largest international conference on voice technology. Let's put this in context. The term voice technology gets used a lot... and by the way, the interviews that you're gonna see, the programming that you're gonna see, particularly under the banner of our new series Think Tank, big picture discussion. There are a lot of issues here with voice technology. But first of all, can you define, Joel, voice technology? I should disclose two things. Joel's a member of our board. Right. Of our not-for-profit company. And also NJIT is one of our higher ed partners. Go ahead. So voice technology is what allows you to engage with any current form of technology without keystroking. It listens to the spoken word and the technology reacts to the spoken word. It's all about language. You'll hear the term natural language. It just means you can talk to technology, and it'll respond to the narrative it's hearing. That simple. Okay. This event is sponsored by Amazon Alexa. Is that the primary...? I mean Alexa... is that the primary voice vehicle that has kicked off this explosion? They were... I don't know if they were first to the market. But as we know, we saw Echo three plus years ago. We saw Alexa three and a half years ago. So they were probably the first in the application in the consumer marketplace. The technology has been around for a while, they just optimized its use, and won the early part of the marketplace. There's a lot of competition now. Samsung is here with Bixby for example. We'll be talking to..."