“Alexa, please write a blog post about yourself for me?”
When I left full-time radio, my goal was to acquire a mix of voice-work and writing work. I’ve been fortunate to do that.
I’ve written before about Witlingo, the tech company that Derek and I were lucky enough to get involved with near its inception. Derek got on board first, doing voice-work for them, and I joined later when they found they needed more voices. It’s been a fascinating ride, seeing from the inside how this Amazon-linked start-up develops and fine-tunes its mission. In short, these people are brilliant.
Recently, they asked me to write regular blog posts. It’s starting with one post per week – thank goodness! Because the learning curve is steep and steady. I’m writing about smart speakers; their uses, their pitfalls, their potential. And there’s a lot of info. Smart speakers are selling faster than smartphones did when they exploded onto the market.
It’s my job to take this techie stuff and make it accessible (and hopefully, interesting) to you and me. It is a fascinating industry and everyone from health care providers to car manufacturers is diving in. If you’re interested in the voice-first world, and how it will eventually apply to you (whether you personally invest in a smart-speaker or not) the blog is HERE.
As someone who has been around Screen Readers since the mid-eighties and speech Recognition systems since the early nineties I can see the value of smart speakers and the technology has sure come a long way since i first got involved. But to me, its old hat and nothing more than a natural progression which seems like it has always been there and part of my life. when the novelty wears off and the next thing comes along, I wonder how many people will find that they actually use the technology on a day to day bases. Oh I can certainly find uses for it, but its nothing more than a convenience verses a need and I just can’t justify the investment.