Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the gaming category.
Much of our interaction with technology these days is dominated by the screen, adding to a disturbing amount of time spent staring at lit up LED displays – often inches from our faces.
San Francisco gaming startup Volley seeks to liberate us from this method of interaction, if only for a brief period of time, through voice computing, elevating the experience of existing products like Amazon's Alexa to create engaging group experiences. Through advances in voice recognition, spurred by AI, the company has developed a series of popular voice-only games that have dominated Alexa's app store charts.
Volley was founded in 2016 by college friends Max Child and James Wilsterman, who met working at the Harvard Crimson newspaper. The idea coincided with the launch of Alexa which got them brainstorming how the device could be used in new ways, particularly for gaming.
"When we saw Alexa come out, we got really excited about the potential for conversational games on that device," said Wilsterman, Volley's CTO.
Today the company has about 5 million monthly players with over $10 million of annual recurring revenue thanks to its premium subscription model. Its most popular game by far is Song Quiz, where players compete to see who is the best at identifying popular songs, but it also has a number of games based on popular network TV game shows like Jeopardy and Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.
Wilsterman believes voice interfaces will transform gaming and reimagine how humans interact with computers. Volley aims to be the "the leading voice AI game company," as Wilsterman put it.
"It's a really novel way to bring people together to play our games in their home," said Wilsterman. "You're putting the phone down, you're using a very natural form of interaction."
This ambition has led Volley to expand beyond Alexa into new platforms like connected TVs. The company recently announced it is launching a native app on Roku, allowing users to play games via voice remotes.
While Volley is not your typical AI company, it is riding the recent hype cycle surrounding the technology. Its office is situated in Hayes Valley, coined Cerebral Valley for its large concentration of AI startups and AI-focused VCs. Its office was even the location of the Cerebral Valley summit, which brought together a host of generative AI enthusiasts.
"The power of AI speech recognition got really good on Alexa and allowed us to create our games," Wilsterman said. "And now you have generative AI coming onto the market, which is making everyone start to to realize that conversational interfaces are important to AI like you see with ChatGPT.
While Volley does not have any games out currently utilizing generative AI, Wilsterman says the company is monitoring the trend closely and hopes to incorporate it into their games one day. He pointed to an Nvidia demo that showed a player interacting with a video game character through voice and having a free flowing conversation powered by AI as a use case for conversational interfaces in gaming.
The company is not without its set backs however. Google's Alexa competitor Google Home recently shut down its app store, affectively kicking Volley games off the platform. Amazon itself has made major cutbacks to Alexa, laying off scores of employees working on the tech, and reassessing its business strategy after taking heavy losses promoting it.
But Wilsterman is undeterred. "We talk with [Amazon] every week, and we have not seen any diminished excitement from them about Alexa. I think they are fully committed."
About Volley
Location: San Francisco
Industries: Voice gaming
Founders: Max Child, CEO, and James Wilsterman, CTO
Founded: 2016
Funding: $60.09 million
Major investors: Bitkraft Ventures, Causeway Media Partnerson and Lightspeed Ventures
Why they were chosen: Volley has trail blazed into a category of its own, leading the way for an oft overlooked segment of gaming poised to break out into the mainstream with the emergence of new technologies.
