What is The Future of Voice?

What is it and what does it mean? Want to join the debate? Well you can!
This Friday, why not join SpinVox for a coffee and a croissant at the Social Media Cafe, London.

The Cafe itself, or The Tuttle Club (as it is often fondly referred to as), runs from 10am ’til 1pm above The Coach & Horses on Greek St.
Not far from Tottenham Court Road, (map here).

Afterwards, (once the coffee has been finished and the croissants have been munched), SpinVox will be staying on for a couple of hours to host a discussion in and around The Future of Voice.

 

What are we talking about?
Well…

SpinVox converts VOICE into TEXT. This much we know, but let’s examine it further.

On one side of the table you’ve got what is fundamentally, a basic utility service that every phone should come with and will one day (very soon) be as ubiquitous across handsets and networks as SMS and email.

Great stuff, but on the other, if you follow the rabbit hole a little deeper, put some meaty thinking around it, what else does it mean?
What else does ‘voice to text’ enable?

Well – SpinVox captures spoken moments which before, without SpinVox, would’ve been lost into the ether.

Capturing your words, your *voice*, and storing them at a place of your choice, for as long you need/require is something that is still relatively new, somewhat esoteric and yet also extremely exciting.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, once your voice IS written down, when you can really see it, what does your voice actually look like?

No I’m not talking about sound waves or pretty patterns on an oscilloscope, but your actual VOICE. The words you use to articulate your thoughts are similar and yet also completely different to those of the person sitting beside you.

Your canter, your meter, your lexicon, your vocabulary, your linguistic gymnastics that you may or may not choose to engage, the way you throw your words together, all of that… They define who you are.

If you saw your voice written down, could you place it?
Could you tell yours from someone else’s? Could you spot yours at a hundred yards?

This literal voice recognition is something I’ve come to enjoy when I’ve received ambling, meandering voicemails (converted into text messages) from my friends.
And it surprises the hell out of them when often I send them the same message back…

If you lost your voice and you had to put up a ‘missing’ poster, what would it say?
What does your voice actually look like?

On top of all that lofty thinking you need to understand that this kind of stuff is happening right now. Millions of people are doing it every week and now, out of the blue, the term ‘voice to text’ is changing slightly…
Suddenly it becomes ‘voice to content’. Your words become searchable. SEARCHING VOICE. That’s something quite special.

It is oft-said that ‘Only by truly enabling something, do you truly empower people to do anything’.

We’ve enabled the notion of ‘voice to content’ – now what does that empower you to do?

 

If you’re interested in coming along (to the SMC and/or to the discussion afterwards) please either sign up at the LondonSocialMediaClubWiki or email me directly here: james.whatley@spinvox.com

See you there!

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under SpinVox, events .
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9 Responses to “ What is The Future of Voice? ”

Jeb Brilliant Says:
April 28th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

James,
I would love to attend but I think it’s just a little to far to go. I hope we get some video from it and a great review.

Jeb

Sizemore Says:
April 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

Hey James – nice post. Bolts nicely onto my own thinking in this area. I have some video that demonstrates just what your voice and certain words would look like out in the ‘wild’. I’ll try and pull it together for Friday.

Terence Eden Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 6:11 pm

A few yearas ago, I found myself unable to use a keyboard. So I installed a voice-to-text package. IBM’s one, I forget the name.

Getting passed the cumbersome method of navigating with voice (“Computer alt eff four”) wasn’t too difficult and actually became quite enjoyable.

But there were three major pitfalls.

1) Talking punctuation and style really breaks the flow of concentration. “Bob comma I computer bold really computer bold off think that you like computer italic Alice computer italic off exclamation point new line.”

2) Talking to yourslef just feels weird. It’s only socially acceptable to talk into a bluetooth headset because people know there4 a person at the other end. Try talking to your computer in a fairly public office. Even if you ignore the confidentiallity or privacy of what you’re “writing”, the social stigma is hard to bear.

3) You *have* to modulate your spoken style to make it easy to read. Just try reading some transcripts of interview or Hansard. “Yes, we’ll, er, that that that’s a pretty good, y’know kinda, point sorta about the coffee that we’re sorry tea thing that we isn’t it?”
If you’re in the same conversation as me, that makes sense to hear – seeing it written down somehow destoys all the meaning. This either means that you prepare everything you’re going to say – and sound like a twat – or never read uncorrect transcripts.

Text to speach may well be a stop-gap for searchable voice. If I’m searching for the conversation when you promised me a pony for my birthday, it’s much more powerful to have that conversation replayed rather than transcribed. I think it provides much more solid “evidence”.

What does my voice look like? A smei-coherant rambling of conflicting tenses and idea that is best understood by a human :-y

(Typed on a Blackberry while in the pouring rain. All spelling mistaked are intended ironically)

Roger Kondrat Says:
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:12 am

Hi Bob.. :)

I am coming today too. Just thought I would finally show some support for you and Lloyd.

Cheers
Roger

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May 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 pm

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May 4th, 2008 at 4:34 am

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SpinVox: What is the future of voice? | Techorade.com Says:
May 4th, 2008 at 4:37 am

[...] company, SpinVox, have raised an interesting thread for conversation in their blog (read it here). More accurately, James Whatley, their “chief of interweb wizardry and bloggery“, has [...]

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May 12th, 2008 at 11:31 am

[...] it was, just over a week ago now, a bunch of like-minded folk from the Club of Tuttle – aka The Social Media Cafe – came together to [...]

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