The voice-to-text revolution
As 2006 turned to 2007, the press naturally filled the empty days between Christmas and New Year with lots of articles looking either back at the year just gone, or forwards to the one ahead.
I was interested to see in one of the business sections that Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital is predicting that 2007 will be the year of voice-to-text.
By voice-to-text she means a variety of products and services which give voice and audio communication the same sort of flexibility and usefulness that we already have with text. Text is searchable. Text can be tagged, and therefore given additional meaning and functionality. Until now, the clumsiness of automated audio transcription has meant that the spoken word has been very hard to index, sort, tag and process. Julie says that this is the year that's all set to change.
A good example of this comes from someone with a similar pedigree to Julie. Christina Domecq is a serial, female entrepreneur (like Julie), and also a winner of the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (Christina in 2006, Julie in 2000). Christina is CEO of SpinVox, a rapidly growing company providing voice-to-screen services. I am pleased to say that SpinVox is also one of my clients.
Their initial product converts your voice messages to text. I don't ever have to dial in to my voicemail any more- my messages are discreetly forwarded on to me as text messages. It's very helpful when I'm stuck in a meeting but don't want to miss an important call. Perhaps most helpfully, when people leave their numbers, I don't have to scrabble for a pen to jot it down- it's there in the text message, and easy to call back. Just another example of an occasion where text is much more flexible and useful than raw audio.
Christina's follow-on products take the application of their technology to the next level- there are lots of times when I would like to use the simplicity of speech but have the flexibility of text. So her next offering includes "Speak-a-blog" and "Speak-an-email". If you've just been to the best gig of your life, you can come out of the concert, call in a report, and it'll be up on your blog before you've even got on the bus home. Smart.
What's all this got to do with podcasting? Well, podcasting is an audio medium which could do with all the functionality of text. We'd like an easy way to have podcasts transcribed. We'd like them to be searchable, so listeners can decide upfront whether it's something they'd like to listen to. We'd like them to be tagged, so that search engines can index them, and so that well-matched advertisments can be inserted. Several companies are beginning to achieve this, notably Podzinger.
If Julie is right, 2006 will have been the year that podcasting reached a mass audience; and 2007 will be the year in which technology catches up to give the medium a maturity which advertisers and marketers can place their faith in.
