Voice Technologies For Authors With Bradley Metrock

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What if the future is voice first? What if people ask AI assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant to find them a book to read? What if the primary consumption of books is in audio format, not print or ebook? I talk about these questions and more with Bradley Metrock.

In the intro, Draft2Digital announce scheduled price changes and promos; the Author's Guild reveals falling author earnings [Publishing Perspectives]; on the flip-side, Lindsay Buroker reveals her lessons learned after 8 years self-publishing, and Rachael Herron shares her (encouraging) author earnings for 2018.

I also discuss some of the tech announcements coming out of CES, which also revolve around voice assistants this year. Alexa is now in over 100 million devices [The Verge], and is in all kinds of devices from kitchen equipment to speakers, headphones and TVs, as well as smart home devices and car integration [Digital Trends].

Need more help with your author business? Check out my books, audiobooks and courses on the craft and business of writing. Includes How to Market a Book, How to Make a Living with your Writing, and The Successful Author Mindset, all available in audio format. Or check out my courses on writing a novel, or how to write non-fiction.

Bradley Metrock is the CEO of Score Publishing which runs Digital Book World and the Alexa Conference, as well as the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network.

He's also the host of This Week In Voice Podcast which discusses advanced in-voice technology.

You can listen above or on iTunes or your favorite podcast app or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• The way that voice technology is changing the way we think of computers

• A brief overview of what voice assistants are

• How the discovery of content, including books, is going to change with voice tech

• Getting comfortable with the different companies who deliver your content

• The future of audiobooks, narration and voice synth

• On the rise of ‘voice branding’

• Bradley’s thoughts on the roll-out of 5G in the next few years

You can find Bradley Metrock at BradleyMetrock.com and on Twitter @bmetrock

Transcript of Interview with Bradley Metrock

Joanna: Hi everyone, I'm Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com. And today, I'm here with Bradley Metrock. Welcome, Bradley.

Bradley: Hi, Joanna, thank you for having me. It's an honor.

Joanna: Oh, it's great to have you on the show. Just a little introduction.

Bradley is the CEO of Score Publishing which runs Digital Book World and the Alexa Conference, as well as the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network. He's also the host of ‘This Week In Voice' podcast which discusses advanced in-voice technology, and I'm a listener so I'm very excited.

Bradley, before we get into it, tell us a bit more about you and how you got into publishing and voice tech in particular.

Bradley: Sure. How much time you got?

Joanna: A potted history.

Bradley: I'll start back in 2008. I started a completely unrelated business that was in the video game, retail, entertainment space. And in 2013 I sold that business and wasn't able to rush into anything new.

I'd had always had an interest in publishing. During that video game business, I actually released a book that sort of was strategic to help that business. And I had always been interested in publishing, I had always been interested in this idea that the gatekeepers that used to control publishing are gone. And if they're not gone, then they're greatly diminished, and they're only in your way if you choose that to be the case.

And so, in the aftermath of selling that business, I started learning some new skills and picking up some things that were related to publishing. I started learning Apple's publishing software, iBooks Author, which I found fascinating and I still do, and use that to create some content, some interactive books, and then got engaged by some companies to do that.

One thing turned into another and all of a sudden, we're creating some interactive content now. And we have a new company now, and so, we called it Score Publishing. And so, we were off and running.

And as it turned out, a lot of these companies that we were working with to create interactive content, these were forward-thinking progressive companies living on the frontier of tech. ‘What is up with Alexa? What is the deal? What is the deal with voice in general? Should we be doing anything about it?' I'm getting asked this.

I said, ‘Well, shoot. Why are you asking me? I don't know.' But the more I found out about it and investigated it, the more intrigued I became. And, at this point, we're into 2016, and even for 2017, we had galvanized the community of people in companies using iBooks Author.

We had been running an event called The iBooks Author Conference, for some time, and that had grown in popularity. But we thought, ‘You know, why don't we have something called the Alexa Conference? Why don't we try it out and see if anyone shows up?'

We were blown away by the people that showed up. And one of the original speakers that we booked for that was HarperCollins. HarperCollins, at that point, Alexa was brand new, but they were experimenting with…it wasn't even called the Flash Briefing at that point in time, and that's what they had managed to create and they were one of the first speakers. So we had them. Despite no promotion, we had people traveling from overseas to attend, and so, ‘Hey,' we thought, ‘maybe there's something to this.'

And so, we continued to learn more about voice. We continued to grow the Alexa Conference. We then, in 2017, started VoiceFirst.FM because I'd always wanted to start a podcast. And this stupid way I do things, I said, ‘Why don't we just start a podcast network? Doesn't that sound like a bright idea?'

It turned out to be a pretty good idea. But sometimes we bite off more than we could chew, but the result of it has been that we've had this incredible front row seat to this emerging technology that's changing the way every business works, and the way every individual interacts with a computer, and the way our children and our grandchildren are growing up thinking about computers.

Their entire notion of what a computer is and does is different because of voice. And so, I'm fascinated by it.

Along the way with the growth of the iBooks Author Conference, we wanted to have a bigger publishing conference, something broader, something that spans what we would later call the wide world of publishing. We originally approached Tim O'Reilly, who we'd had as a guest on VoiceFirst.FM and who we know, about acquiring tools of change, which used to be a big publishing conference. That was not possible.

So then, we went to F+W Media and we inquired about acquiring Digital Book World. And there's a whole interesting story to that, which is we still have a relationship with them, that's a good relationship. But we ended up being able to acquire that, we ended up being able to take it over, turn it around, and revitalize it, and breathe new life into it.

We've added a voice component but we've also opened it up to everybody else, including self-published authors. And we're heading into 2019 at a pretty good place.

Joanna: It is really interesting, and I love to hear you talk about this. Because I feel so often, I think many people feel that publishing and technology have a time lag. I've written articles on the future book, like 3 years ago, about some of this stuff, no one was interested.

I just love to hear you talk about this stuff in this entrepreneurial independent way, basically, and as an entrepreneur yourself with your own company. So I'm very excited.

But many people listening are not as geeky as you and I about this type of stuff. Many people will have heard of Alexa, but maybe you could just give us like a state of the nation.

What is the current state for voice tech, especially sort of with a slant towards authors and writers?

Bradley: Sure. So this has been a long time in the making, even before I was born, this has been in the making. Much less before I ever started paying attention to it.

But the first step with this was computers had to be able to understand us at least as well as a human being can understand us. Because until you cross that threshold, a lot of stuff really doesn't make sense in terms of investing in the technology.

In the last 5 years, give or take, a little bit more recent than that, according to some people, we have crossed that threshold to where science tells us that human beings are capable, on average, to understand and comprehend about 95% of what another human being says to them. That's our throughput, that's our capability, on average, of understanding and recognizing speech. Computers now have gotten to where they are at above 99%.

Alexa is Amazon's voice assistant. Voice assistant is the phrase that's been given to these artificial intelligences, for lack of a better term, that receive your voice commands and then orient you in the right place, right now, very strictly along the guidelines of what you say.

If I'd say, ‘I want to listen to The Creative Penn Podcast,' it's gonna play it now. So it's going to follow along strictly what I say.

Now, this is far from the end, this is just the beginning, really what we're striving for is not just recognition of speech, but what we're striving for is understanding of intent.

Maybe my intent was, when I said, ‘Play The Creative Penn Podcast,' to play it at a low volume because I'm working on something else. Maybe my intent was, ‘Play the most recent episode,' because I'm caught up. Maybe my intent was, ‘I missed one episode three weeks ago, and that's the only one I've missed.' Maybe my intent was something else.

It's controversial that computers understand us as well as they do but at some point, there will be sort of an inflection point and we will allow these voice assistance to have deep context of us.

And so, if I say, ‘Play the podcast,' I need to say nothing more for the computer, whatever voice assistant we're talking about, Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Samsung's Bixby, whatever, will understand and just implicitly know that I've listened to these other ones and what I'm really referring to is something I never even had to say. And that's where we're going.

Now how does that tie into publishing? Well, it ties into publishing in every way imaginable. If you're a self-publisher or if you're anybody creating content…see, we really don't use the term ‘self-publisher' for Digital Book World. I like to use the phrase ‘independent publisher.'

Joanna: So do I.

Bradley: Yeah. Because, frankly, self-publisher all you're doing is telegraphing that you're a sole proprietorship, you're a one-man army. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that.

Really, independent publisher captures it a little bit better, in our opinion. Look at what you've done. You have a whole series of books, they're sitting on that shelf behind you. If you didn't know any better, you might be a 50-person company. So what difference does it make?

And so, if an independent publisher captures that, captures everybody without any of the stigma that still some like to associate with not being published by a major publisher, with a book that shows up in Barnes & Noble, or whatever.

But for anybody publishing content, whether you're publishing fiction, non-fiction, whether you're publishing long-form articles to the internet, whether you're publishing audiobooks, podcasts, whether you're publishing videos to YouTube, or any other website.

Think about how you find a video now, or how you find content now, or someone learns about your book now. There's only so many ways that that happens, either one human being tells another human being about your books, or Google tells another human being about your books, or social media tells another human being about your books.

There's a few other things, of course live events are a huge part of it, that's a big part of our business, there's some other things to round out that pie chart. It's about to be completely rewritten because voice is about to step in.

Sooner than any of us think, and this is why Google is so worried and why Google Assistant is everything to them, seeing Alexa, and Siri, and these other things, the days of you going to a browser and going to google.com, or just starting on your homepage, or whatever, by default, and typing something in as a query, and then having to understand the semantics of, ‘Well, do I put it in quotes? Do I need a minus? If I search for voice technology, am I going to get stuff related to the opera? How do I segregate out results?'

All that is going to go. And what you're going to be left with is computers that have all of your data, everything you've ever done, the purchase you made on Amazon yesterday, the purchase you made on Amazon three years ago, the podcast you listened to yesterday, the video you watched three years ago, the conference you went to a month ago, all the birthdays in your calendar, that meeting you missed two months ago, that email sequence with a friend that was five years ago…everything.

And so, the concept of discoverability, and I wrote a big article about this, last year, that was, by far, the most read thing that I wrote, and it was on DigitalBookWorld.com and some other places, is that how we discover books and how we discover new content, in general, will be filtered through this voice assistant.

So, soon, next year, three years, five years, doesn't really matter, you've got to be thinking about it now, I will say, ‘Alexa, I have some vacation coming up next week and I need a new book to read. What should I read?'

‘Oh, well. You know what? There's a new book by that science fiction author whose book you read last year, that new book came out last month, you could read that. That podcast you just listened to two weeks ago in your car, that author has released three books in the last two years, one of which managed to be on ‘The New York Times' bestseller list. That's an option.

Four years ago, when you went on your beach vacation, you read this book while you were sitting at the pool. You haven't touched that in a while, that's an option. Or we saw you googling this stuff about starting a new business. There's a great new book that was featured in the news recently about entrepreneurship, and maybe that's of interest as well.'

There you go. Giving that sort of information, which is right around the corner, there's no more going to Google. And that information, that I just regurgitated orally, screens are going to be part of this.

This is not an audio-only future, this is what we call a voice-first future. So, as opposed to interacting with computers, primarily with the QWERTY keyboard, or primarily with swiping and tapping on a glass screen on your mobile, the primary way that you'll look to interact with computers will be voice-first.

And then, if that's not sufficient, then another interface second and you'll have screens and visual stuff to go along with that the majority of time.

So they say voice assistance and these nascent AIs, which is what they are, it just should cause anyone creating content that they hope one day gets read…if you write something and you don't care if it gets read, stop…I don't know why you're watching this. If you want someone to read it, then you have to care about how it's discovered. And it's changing right before your eyes right now.

Joanna: I know some people listening will be kind of scared by this possible future. And I agree with you, I think it's definitely the way it's going, especially in a time when people are saying they want to spend less time on screens.

I hear parents saying, ‘I don't mind how much time my kid spends with Alexa because it's reading them audiobooks, or they're playing voice games, or whatever,' and it's like, ‘Oh, okay. This is interesting.'

But I wanted to ask you about this discoverability because several people have said to me they can't actually find this podcast on Alexa. And I have thus found that they should be using TuneIn or AnyPod, and I'm going to put links in the show notes as to how people can do it.

But the discoverability on these devices, right now, does seem quite basic. Even with over 50,000 Alexa skills, it's still quite difficult. So thinking forward, so 10 years ago, I started putting blogs on Google, and now, my site gets found.

How do I start now to make sure I am found? Is it Google Snippets? Is it Skills? What is it that we can start building so that we are found when people ask Alexa, or Siri, or whatever what they should read?

Bradley: You know, if you knew the answer to that…

Joanna: I'd be a millionaire.

Bradley: You'd be pulling in more money than you already are pulling in. The truth is that if that answer were known, if I knew that answer right now, it really wouldn't be relevant for long because it all changes so quickly.

When I get asked that, I guess the way I would phrase it is you have to be comfortable with the tech giants. Facebook is a different animal, Facebook is garbage, my opinion, they're not to be trusted, they haven't earned the right to participate in this voice landscape and to have the data that is required to participate in the ways I've described. They haven't earned it; it's a bad company.

Amazon, the entire company was formed around a customer-centric model to where they're all about the customer. You can argue you don't like what they're doing and that's fine. There is no argument that their entire existence and history is built around serving the customer. And that's from lowering price as much as possible, even to the point of breaking entire industries, making returns easy, all sorts of stuff. So that's a company that most people feel like you can trust. Now we'll find out if we're wrong.

Google, the verdict's out, but in general, the company had a slogan, at some point, you know, what? ‘Don't do evil,' or something?

Joanna: Don't be evil. But that's not theirs anymore.

Bradley: Yeah. We'll give them a shot.

Apple tends to value privacy. Now, they're having a lot of problems but they tend to value privacy and data security.

You have to get comfortable with these companies because if you do not participate in their ecosystems, you will not be found. So the biggest things you can do is get over the problems you have with Amazon and get your books on Amazon, period, end of sentence.

Google, get over the problems you have with Google and pay close attention because Google is making a lot of investments right now into the publishing space, and they're doing it kinda quietly. They're making huge investments in audiobooks, they have rolled out something called Talk to Books, this past year, which I wrote another article about, which is a huge deal.

And then, what they're doing with podcasts, they're investing heavily in that space. And keep in mind, podcasts are really nothing but an audiobook formatted a little bit differently. They're the sister of an audiobook. So you've got to get into both of these ecosystems.

Apple is a little bit less important, you can get in there too if you want, that's probably a good idea too because Siri is a little bit behind but it looks like they're making the investments to catch up.

The biggest thing you can do is get into these ecosystems and plant the flag. On the Google side, I assume that this podcast is available through Google Podcasts, I don't know, but if it weren't, you would want to be there because Google is actively transcribing, on their own, privately, telling no one, all podcasts that are in their ecosystem.

And the reason they're doing it is because Google Assistant has to be able to parse that a little bit easier, and so, they're doing it as a means of bridging that gap of voice.

There's a lot of these different things that these big players are doing on their own with the content that people have injected into their systems to prepare for the future. And while I can't tell you, ‘Here's what you need to do to be number one on…' ‘Alexa, tell somebody, ‘Hey, tell me a great publishing podcast,” how do we make sure that's ‘The Creative Penn?' Even Amazon couldn't tell you that.

But where you start is warming up to the beast and diving in because like it or not, either you're going to choose to play in the sandbox or you're not. And if you're not, hey, that's fine, you just need to have something else and I don't know what the something else is.

Joanna: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. My play with this is still content. So it really is more audiobooks, more podcast episodes because I feel that our voice, the way we talk with podcasts is very different to an audiobook.

So if someone is searching, asking one of these voice assistants for something, they're going to use the way we talk as opposed to the way we would type. So I think podcasting, audiobooks, transcripts of things ‘should' play into the way this voice search works.

I also read that Google's using snippets quite a lot to answer specific questions. So, making sure you have a snippet plugin for your website, that type of thing. These are not hard-and-fast tips.

Any thoughts particularly on audiobooks? Because many authors are thinking about that too.

Bradley: Oh, yeah. I think, first of all, an audiobook should exist. I mean let's just start with that.

If you're going to the trouble of writing that science fiction epic that you've been wanting to write your whole life, or your memoirs, or a how-to on carpentry, or whatever it is that you wanna write…because, as you know, and I know you know, everyone's got a book in them and it wants to come out. And we're so fortunate to live in an age where it can.

If you're going to invest that time, and the money, and the mental bandwidth, and you're going to make the sacrifices necessary to bring your book to life, it is unfathomable that you wouldn't go further and release an audiobook for it.

Maybe, in the past, there was a question about that, that question is gone, I mean…and you can narrate it yourself. At Digital Book World, we had some great vendors there who do a fantastic job providing the tools necessary to play in the sandbox, Findaway and Findaway Voices is a big one. We just used them to release our own audiobook, which was our compilation of snippets and excerpts from our podcast. But whether it's yourself narrating or somebody else, you gotta make that happen. That's number one.

So assuming that you've gotten to that point, then you've got some interesting options. And I love the idea of taking an audiobook…There's an argument on whether you would want to fully transcribe…you know, a lot of people narrate audiobooks and they sort of riff over the top of it. It's not a verbatim reading, it's a reading-plus there's extra content in there. And…

Joanna: With non-fiction. I don't know if that would ever happen with fiction.

Bradley: You're right. And so, you could take perhaps a transcription of that and put it somewhere on the internet.

But I think what's more interesting is finding a way, and there's a few different ways to do it, but finding a way to take an audio excerpt of that audiobook, and then either append it to the end of a podcast that you create yourself, or append it to the end of someone else's podcast.

Or another thing that's coming real soon is vastly superior monetization of podcasts because that industry is evolving very rapidly. I think one thing we're gonna see people do is serialize audiobook content across podcasts, across podcast distribution vehicles. You're already seeing it a little bit with companies like Cereal Box. Do you know that company?

Joanna: One of the reasons I started podcasting, 10 years ago, was Podiobooks, which was podcasting audiobooks. That's how I found a lot of people. So that type of stuff has been around for 10 years, but of course, it wasn't mainstream because we didn't have the smartphones.

So it's like you said earlier, this stuff has been around, it just hasn't gone mainstream because the tech hasn't been there.

But I do want to ask you on audiobooks as well, about the narration. Because we've been talking about us speaking to the AI and the AI doing stuff, but what about AI synth? I've been looking at voice synth stuff.

I have enough of my voice around now that a voice synth should be able to take and do my voice. And they've done it with Trump, and Obama, and all of that.

What do you think about the AI narration possibly taking over from human narration when it comes to audiobooks, but also, even like replacing you and I on our podcasts or something?

Bradley: Sure. And people just don't realize it. We've got the Alexa Conference coming up in two weeks, here in the United States, and so this type of thing is top-of-mind. You referenced Trump and Obama, I think what's you're referencing there's a company called lyrebird.ai.

For people who haven't checked this out, they should, it's lyre, like an instrument, lyrebird.ai. And that company, they're far from the only one, but they're at the forefront of creating…I guess I would call it emulation technology.

The way their technology works is that they can…and I mean I believe I'm regurgitating this correctly, they probably improved it since I've looked at it because it's moving quickly. But they can take 45 to 60 seconds of you speaking, any snippet of this, you don't have to be reading something specific with different phonemes, you can be saying anything for across 45 to 60 seconds, with the way their tech works. And with that, they will reproduce your voice to such accuracy that most people will not be able to tell the difference.

And this is already being used. This technology made an appearance first in music studios. So you've got traveling musicians, rappers, or whoever and they'll be on tour and they'll want to hit the studio. So after they play one night, this happens in Nashville all the time, they'll play a show, and then at 2:00 in the morning, they'll go to music row and hit up a studio, and they'll record.

And then, they'll be out the door to the next city at 7:00 a.m. or whatever. Now, in that scenario and almost any other, if an audio engineer is capturing that, and then after the fact they realize, ‘Well, shoot, we didn't get this,' or, ‘There was a problem with this audio,' or, ‘We need something else,' the rapper's not coming back to town for another six months. So what are you going to do?

But now, you don't have to worry about it because they have technology that can take it the rest of the way. And it's being used. Now it's being used more and more by the same studios, the same audio engineers, but in the trade/big publishing audiobook production process.

Hillary Clinton is good example; she narrated her whole audiobook. And, her time, like so many other people's, is valuable. She can sit there and read her book but when you're producing it and you're editing it, if you realize, ‘Wait a minute, those words could've been enunciated a little bit clearly. Wait a minute, there was a problem, the computer didn't save this right,' or, ‘Wait a minute…' whatever, now you can use technology to prevent her from having to come back into the studio and just sort of emulating her speech in a way that no one would ever know.

Joanna: I'm super excited about this. I mean one of my ideas around this is around licensing of voice and voice branding. A lot of people have asked me to narrate audiobooks, and I'm like, ‘You can't pay me enough, to be honest, it's hard enough to narrate my own,' but it's something that I think a narrator can sell audiobooks beyond the author sometimes now.

My husband loves Stephen Fry, the British actor Stephen Fry, his voice is a brand. I mean this type of licensing and voice branding. And you have, I think, quite a distinctive voice, and clearly I do now after years of doing audio, and people hear it and they recognize you.

Do you think this kind of voice branding, voice licensing would be something?

Bradley: For sure. Already people are inquiring about stuff like a Morgan Freeman or people with recognizable like voices on a celebrity scale.

And it's possible that there's been some sort of transaction that has set a price for it, but if there has been one, I'm not aware of it. I think it's going to be very interesting to see how these roads converge. Because we're there.

We're at the point where a Stephen Fry, a Morgan Freeman, a whoever can have their voice and basically sell their voice as if they were selling a font on the computer.

Joanna: It's kind of scary because authors have moral rights to their work and don't want it to be used in a way that reflects badly on them. And you can see the problems with this. But it's still exciting.

But you said, ‘We're there already,' but I feel like one of the big things on the horizon is 5G, which is 2020, probably 2021. And then, looking at the global sense, it will kind of be rolling out. So from what I understand about 5G, it's going to be a step change in technology.

Do you see that there'll be an even bigger tipping point with sort of 5G? And what are you looking forward to then?

Bradley: 5G is very important in the continued evolution of that kind of infrastructure. It impacts voice, just to start there, in reducing the latency of the voice transaction.

You ask Alexa something and it's going to take a couple of seconds to parse that and receive it back. And there are obvious implications for reducing that time, but then there's very not-obvious and very unintuitive implications for reducing that time as well. And it will just allow that type of computing to flourish even more.

But it will also have a great impact on things like autonomous cars. And that's just another good example where you pretty much have to have technology that performs a little bit better than what we've got right now for the data throughput necessary for cars not to be running into each other all over the road if something goes wrong or whatever. So there's several examples about how it's going to impact our life. I'm bullish on it as well, I think it's going to be great.

Joanna: Even autonomous cars, people won't necessarily look at screens, they will probably be listening more. So autonomous cars means more people listening.

Bradley: Autonomous cars will be the best thing for self-publishers that has ever happened in the world. This is not a joke.

Joanna: Tell us why.

Bradley: Think about all the time that drivers spend driving. Think about all the time that goes into the daily commute to and from. All the time where if a family's on vacation, you have two-thirds, three-fourths, four-fifths of the family able to do things and not the whole family together.

When you have autonomous vehicles…and no one's really sure when they're coming, although, again, that's going to be sooner than people think. 10 to 20 years is what people say, you're going to see it sooner.

For people creating content, when you open up the ability for people to buy content and consume content with not just their recreational time but with their corporate time that they're spending traveling somewhere and time that people are on the road, you change everything. Because think about how many books you would read, or I would read, if we could read them in the car.

And yes, you can play an audiobook in the car while you drive. Yes, that's absolutely true. But can you really be deeply engaged in the car, or whatever? And then the fact that you are having to drive to and from work, it just shapes the whole rest of your day.

I'm not the best at articulating it but what I can tell you is that I'm a big believer in the fact that when you combine voice assistance and all the stuff that I talked about to begin the show, and this computer that understands you, that reduces the friction of you discovering new content that you're going to like.

Combine that with this incredible new blue ocean of free time, you're going to get demand for content and willingness to pay for content because people have more time to consume it now than you've ever had before. It's exciting. And that's a whole other rat's nest of topics, but I am a big believer in that as well. And it will impact us during our lifetime.

Joanna: And you and I, as I said at the beginning, we geek out on this kind of stuff. So just tell people…because we are out of time, there's so much we could talk about, so we'll have to do it again sometime.

Tell people where they can find out more, what else you've got going on, where should they go to find out more about the VoiceFirst, and also Digital Book World.

Bradley: I appreciate that. And thank you so much for having me on this show, by the way. If you want to learn more about what we do, if voice intrigues you, if anything on this show intrigues you, I would start with going to www.voicefirstevents.com, that is our portfolio of events that we do currently just within the United States, that's soon to change and there will be some overseas popping in there.

Digital Book World's part of that portfolio. For anybody listening, obviously everybody's interested in publishing, everybody's interested in self-publishing, that's the audience for the show, everybody understands the empowerment that comes with that, I would highly encourage anyone listening, or watching this, or whatever, to check out Digital Book World.

Digital Book World 2019, for anyone listening to the show or watching this show, would be, in our opinion, the best conference you could attend, if you're going to attend one, because you will not only extend your network vastly, but you will open your eyes to all the different ways to leverage technology, in the short term, that will maximize all the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears you put into writing whatever it is you've written.

Joanna: Fantastic. And tell people about your podcast as well.

Bradley: I host a show called ‘This Week In Voice.' I host a couple of different shows but This Week In Voice is our flagship show, ThisWeekInVoice.com, you can learn more about it there or search on your favorite podcast provider. We're in season three of the show now, it's a great place to get and stay current with what's going on in voice technology.

We have a great panel of guests every week on this show while we're in season. If you go to VoiceFirst.FM, you will see all sorts of content hosted within our family of podcasts, within our network, stuff like voice marketing, out in LA, VUX World, which is hosted out of London, Alexa in Canada, which is hosted out of Vancouver.

We're fortunate to have a great group of folks producing content that is in the realm of voice, that has something to do with voice at least. And that's a good place to check out too if you're interested in learning more.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for your time, Bradley, that was just fascinating.

Bradley: Joanna, what you're doing is great. You're killing it, you've done such a good job creating your business, your platform for yourself. I'm honored that you invited me to be part of it.