Joseph Turow Author of Voice Catchers on Voice Tech, Marketing and Privacy – Voicebot Podcast 213

Joseph Turow is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication — the same school where he earned his PhD. Turow is the author of over 150 articles and 10 books including the recently published “The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet.”

The New York Times has called Turow, “the ranking wise man on some thorny new-media and marketing topics.” He has some pointed critiques of how voice technology is used, what should change, and where we need further debate. We go point-by-point through many of these arguments and find both common ground and areas of disagreement.

There is widespread discussion about the potential for privacy infringement related to voice assistants and other voice technologies. However, Professor Turow is specific about the practices that he says are problematic. We talk about emotion detection using NLP and sentiment analysis in real-time, the tension between personalization and privacy, and much more.

I thoroughly enjoyed this discussion in part because so often I only hear people in our industry only discuss the technology’s benefits. I don’t agree with all of Professor Turow’s conclusions but I recognize that he is addressing a series of important questions that many people in the industry mostly ignore.

Show Notes – Professor Joseph Turow Interview – Voice Catchers

You can listen to the podcast interview above, on Google or Apple Podcasts, or most of the leading podcast players.

 

 

 

 

 

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