And so 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 talk about what the future holds for that thing we take for granted so much and yet defines us in such a multitude of ways, Voice.
That’s us there look ^ just before it all got very deep and intense!
- Pic Courtesy of RachelC
James Scroggs, VP of Consumer Business here at SpinVox, kicked things off with a quick psycho-metricgame for everyone (is that what you called it James?), which while not only being a lot of fun it also turned up some nice surprises about one’s self. I won’t go into the details here lest the game be ruined for you if you ever get a chance to play. Needless to say - it certainly broke the proverbial ice. 
The results of aforementioned activity served as quite a nice segway into James’ introduction -
James - over to you:
“I’ve long held that people have lost their voice – call it the stuttering of the democratic process, not in having a right to vote or the mechanic to do so, but the real sense that a person’s voice can count for something, be purposeful, weighty, and heard amongst the din of Rice Crispy culture and politics.
I spent five years at MTV striving to have a 25 year old brand continue to earn its place as a platform for young people to have a voice in a formalised broadcast environment, while YouTube and the new social nooks and crannies became the new playground.
Now I find myself in the realms of a brilliant system, SpinVox, that can make the human voice matter again. How? Because SpinVox takes a voice – literally the energy in motion of particles in the air - and converts it into text data. That data can then be posted as content into the digital world.
It’s a revolution: for me, voice is the last human faculty that has not been obfuscated or complicated by the advances of science. It remains entirely naked, and therefore a pure expression of your ID, your self.
If only 30% of the language processed by our system is Dictionary-documented, then the complexities and personalities contained in the spoken language and vernacular suggest that the voice continues to be an immensely powerful tool for us all to emotional connect with each other, create and find social order.
So what is the future of voice?
What’s is its summit of its mountainous journey?”
And lo, the discussion began.
Would it be crass to say that towards the end, as the two hour session came to a close, my brain genuinely hurt. I kid you not. Some of the future-thinking being thrown around the table was simply extraordinary.
Things like -
(and this is just stream of consciousness stuff that I wrote during the session - so excuse the randomness)
Homogeneous. Tribal. Individual. Tagging conversations. Semantics. Granularity. Language switchers. Addressability. Capturing voice. Search voice. Indexing. Projection. Personas. Same message, same language, same person, different voice. Meta tags. Waves and particles. Habitual. Instant Capture. Capturing original thought. Reference points. Sociagraph => Vocal-graph. Having something to say. Having the right to say something. Naming conventions. ‘Blogging’ is alien to most, writing a diary isn’t. Speaking a blog, more alien. Speaking your diary? Potentially easier. Timelines of speech. SpinVox as a social tool. Enable = Empower.
There’s so much still spinning around upstairs - a lot of thought around voice/speech/personas etc -
While that’s stewing - why not have a read of some of the other output that has hit teh interwebz since last week…
First - starting off lightly - Francine talks about her game interpretations.
Next - getting deeper - Terence nails some of the open questions that have got him thinking
Then - Sizemore, on behalf of the Tuttle, hints that the event itself may’ve ruined his day (in a good way)
Also - and this was just lovely - Ben Robinson - who sadly couldn’t make it on the day - has put up his thoughts over at IntoMobile. Nice one Ben.
Finally, big thanks to all that attended:
Roger, Rachel, Sizemore, Terence, Ciaran, Ewan, Laura, Jay, Rob, Benjamin, Lloyd, Francine, Toby, Anne Marie and…
…if I’ve missed anyone off please shout!
The feedback has been great and I think there is definitely scope for a similar event at some point in the near future…
Watch this space.
PS - If you’ve got anything to add, (or if you’ve written up your thoughts somewhere), let me know in the comments and I’ll amend accordingly!
May 12th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
This sounds a fascinating debate & I’m sorry I missed it. Voice was the original method of communication but has gradually been replaced by text based communications for more and more of our daily communication activity. A while back it was email & SMS & latterly it has been blogs and now Twitter, Jaiku et al. So what will happen to voice in the future - will it continue to be increasingly marginalised or will it make a come back as something that stands out above the blur of email, SMS, Tweets & Jaikus?