This year, I assisted Lisa Ferrante-Walsh, iZotope’s Senior Director of Software Engineering, with organizing a panel for the AES Show Fall 2020. Our panel, titled Evolution of Audio Products – Demystifying Innovation, used case studies to present strategies for bringing innovation into the product development process.
We brought in two experts from the audio tech industry to share their experiences, and I also presented about innovation at iZotope.
Elpiniki Pappa, Product Owner for Developer Platforms at Native Instruments, presented on innovation within Kontakt. This was especially interesting because Kontakt is a very long established product, with a complicated ecosystem of creators and end users. NI has to balance a lot of variables when adding new features because of the legacy they have built up over the years.
Katrina Lui, Software Engineer at Descript, presented about innovation in Descript’s text-based audio editing platform. In contrast to NI’s longstanding legacy concerns, Descript is a smaller, newer company working on cutting edge tech. Katrina focused on Descript’s recent integration of Lyrebird, a tool for generating audio for words the user types, and on how they designed the user interface and workflows surrounding it with an interative approach.
I presented a look into the development process behind Dialogue Match, my first product at iZotope. My presentation focused on our iterative approach as we designed a brand new plugin. I discussed the evolution from reverb matching tech developed by our research team to a fully fledged product.
Overall, I think it was a successful panel, and I’m glad we were able to make it happen even with the complications of a remote and virtual conference amidst the covid pandemic.