Syed Ahmed is a Developer Advocate at PubNub, a global Data Stream Network and real-time infrastructure-as-a-service company based in San Francisco, California. PubNub's products allow developers to build realtime web, mobile, voice and IoT applications. Low network latency is especially important for voice enabled applications that integrate with IoT devices, as any delay during a conversational interaction can affect usability and frustrate users. 

In this episode, Syed explains how PubNub solves the latency problem by using a serverless architecture of PubNub Blocks, and walks us through a simple real-world example of a voice enabled doorbell. We learn about the publisher-subscriber pattern that underpins this technology, and why building voice apps with PubNub is quicker, easier and much more scalable than other methods. 

A nice surprise during this conversation was that using PubNub Blocks not only improves the network performance of voice apps, but can be used to add advanced features such as contextual memory between phrases, and even between voice devices on different platforms, allowing developers to build more advanced interactions. It's a great episode, so check it out! This is a time-limited preview. To hear the full episode, and access the full catalogue of episodes and bonus content, become a Voice Tech Pro https://voicetechpodcast.com/pro

Links from the show: 

• Full show notes: https://voicetechpodcast.com  
• PubNub Blocks: https://www.pubnub.com/docs/blocks-catalog
• PubNub project example: https://hackernoon.com/voice-alexa-and-realtime-making-interactions-into-lasting-experiences-fa46aab9503b
• More articles from Syed: https://medium.com/@nxsyed
• Publish-subscribe pattern: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish%E2%80%93subscribe_pattern
• Syed's code examples on Github: https://github.com/nxsyed
• Syed on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nxsyed
• Syed on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/nxsyed/  
• Syed's personal site: https://www.nxsyed.me/

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