“Hey Siri” “Ok Google” “Hey Alexa”

If I told you 15 years ago that we would all be talking to our electronic devices, would you have believed me? Would you have thought I needed some therapy?

Regardless of your answer, it’s clear that speech recognition has become normalized. We now talk to our devices in order to call a friend, to find directions to a local restaurant, and even, when we are really bored, to tell us a joke.

On today’s episode, we talk with Igor Jablokov, a pioneer in voice recognition. Igor led the team at IBM that created the first ever speech enabled web browser and then went on to found the company Yap, which was sold to Amazon in 2011 and became the basis for Amazon Alexa.

Now, Igor is the CEO of another startup: Pryon — which seeks to bring the power of voice recognition to the enterprise level. Instead of having to manually sort through emails, databases, and documents at work, Pryon enables you to simply ask your device for the relevant information, and then the machine does the discovery and surfacing for you.

But Igor is more than a technologist — he’s also a self described artist and creative.

And the episode is about much more than just speech recognition — it’s about the power of adaptation, non-linearity, and believing in your own distinctive journey as you pursue innovation.

As Igor said “There’s not a recipe. You can try and hit some of the basics. But each one of us has this unique fingerprint and path. It’s just doing the hard work every day”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!