May 5, 2019
Dave Isbitski became Amazon's first chief evangelist for Alexa in 2014. That’s five years, but in smart speaker time, it’s an eternity. Dave started out hosting office hours in Alexa Slack, going to Meetups and more recently is most commonly seen speaking at conferences around the world.
We caught up at the Alexa Live online conference recording session in Seattle shortly after he finished up recording the keynote. Prior to his role on the Alexa team, Isbitski was the chief evangelist for the Amazon App Store. That was preceded by six years as a technical evangelist at Microsoft and time as a technical manager for Johnson & Johnson. We talk about building a developer community in the early days after the Alexa launch, how voice is changing consumer expectations and what brands should be thinking about in building their voice strategy.