In our personal lives, voice or conversation has always been the primary mode of communication. Right from birth, we are taught to hear and recognise voices. Now with tech advancements, it is no wonder that this “conversationalist” approach is coming to the digital landscape as well. With the rise of voice tech, things are primed for a wide array of use cases in voice technology.
One such interesting application of voice technology is its use in developing and distributing podcasts. Let’s see some notable work happening in this arena.
1 – Podible
It is interesting to note that voice tech market leader Amazon doesn’t lead in this space. It has been observed that the market share of the e-commerce giant has declined from 90% at its peak to roughly more than 50%. A good reason for this is the unsatisfactory AI powering the podcast recommendation algorithms. As a result, user experience remains a lot to be desired.
This is the challenge that Podible wants to tackle with its beta launch in March this year. It claims to be the only truly AI-centric app platform to give personalised recommendations for podcasts. The underlying principle is simple yet smart. The podcasts are transcribed to text which is then processed by machine learning topic modelling to add topic to ‘Podible Genome’ a huge database that shows how podcasts intersect.
In order to provide accurate recommendations, Podible looks at the user’s listening history. These may comprise of elements like saved episodes, ‘following’ episodes, and played episodes. Of course, on the anvil, is a more efficient monetisation system to help content creators earn from their collaboration with Podible.
2 – Voxsnap
Today, one in six Americans own at least one voice activated smart speaker. This stat is expected to improve dramatically in a matter of just a few years. What this means for businesses is that they need to find a way to transform existing collaterals and documentation into voice products. Well, as they say, there is an app for that!
Voxsnap announced the launch of its platform that serves to transform text to human voice. Things like blogs, whitepapers, case studies, and articles can now be easily converted to voice and thus help retain users and find new ones using voice tech.
Listeners can tune in to Voxsnap platform to get access to informative content on a wide range of subjects including finance, technology, health, marketing and even self-improvement. There would be multiple ways to enhance a wide distribution of the voice content. Users can embed the audio into blogs; they can use it as podcasts, use it with Alexa, or even utilise other voice channels to distribute the voice content.
The reach of podcasts listeners is expected to surge from 67 million in the US in 2017 to 112 million in 2021. This presents a massive potential for businesses to embrace voice tech to the fullest and be ready for the next big tech disruption. If you are wondering whether the ecosystem is prepared for this change then these two use cases show that work is happening (and happening fast) around voice tech space such as podcasting. This, in turn, will help businesses to leverage voice technology to gain maximum yields.
