re: future of voice

This was originally supposed to be my comment on James Whatley’s post summarising the ‘Future of voice‘ meet up. It came out so long i decided not to flood the SpinVox blog. Forgive thought short-cuts, please refer to James’ post if you feel lost:

Hey, as I promised I did some thinking on the subject and having read this post found it fascinating how different my initial perspective on the topic was. I tell you something… you lacked a sociologist at that table!

First of: “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.”

Well, well sir, what is a true self? There are social constrains and social constrains internalized. What one says is not necessarily what they mean, right? We are self-conscious, or in this context ’self-reflective’, we auto-censor what we say according to circumstances, listeners etc. we might not even be aware of the censorship that is going on inside our heads, because we internalized it so deeply it seems ‘ours’. (etc etc, I can talk about this at length from sociological point of wiev, but I’ll spare you)

Secondly (thus) there’s the fact that the process writing gives a lot more time to auto-censor what we are trying to (sic!) say. We can cross something over and replace with something else before we publish it. Not with voice. Said - bang, done. But then again - immediately dead.

Here goes challenge/opportunity/danger (mind the last one) of services like SpinVox. Voice has no material form other than sound waves. I.e. once said things ‘die’, what’s been just said no longer exist but more to the point there’s no material evidence it ever existed unless recorded. The opposite with text - it is intrinsically documented (materialized) and needs destroying if it were to not exist.

What I thought of on the spot was few social situations resulting from the instantaneity of dictating one’s voice, having it  materialized in close to real time and more to the point published:

- Talking in the ‘high’ of a moment: things we say and might later regret being documented or REGRET HAVING LOST due to not documenting them fast enough (isn’t that where what SpinVox could do magic?)

- The written word and the spoken word are much different. You can tell books that were dictated from the books that were written. That affects language.

- We are used to (generally) having our writing turned into ‘content’ (web publication) but not voice. This is a strange concept to people (it feels a bit strange to me too). I suppose that’s the challenge for your marketing team: lure people into doing something practical (say, call, dictate your shopping list have it sent to one’s partner while their in a supermarket, makes everybody’s life a lot easier) to make it more familiar.

finito, i think. Hope this will be of any use to you.