In this episode, Teri welcomes the “Oracle of Voice” and one of the top thought leaders on Voice, Brian Roemmele.

Welcome Brian Roemmele!

Brian is the consummate Renaissance man. He is a scientist, researcher, analyst, connector, thinker and doer. He is also referred to as the “Oracle of Voice” and is actually credited for having come up with the term “Voice First”. Over the long, winding arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects along the way.

Brian actively shares his findings and observations across fora like Forbes, Huffington Post, Newsweek, Slate, Business Insider, Daily Mail, Inc, Gizmodo, Medium, Quora (An exclusive Quora top writer for: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013), Twitter (quoted and published), Around the Coin (earliest cryptocurrency podcast), Breaking Banks Radio and This Week In Voice on VoiceFirst.fm that surfaces everything from Bitcoin to Voice Commerce.

Getting into Voice

  • Initially thought he would be a physicist. Studied physics very early.
  • He had a love for physics, astrophysics, astrobiology, mathematics, computers and a lot of other things.
  • As a young boy, he had friends whose parents worked at Bell Laboratories and that was how he saw a voice synthesizer for the first time.
  • He was always interested in astronomy. The physics, mathematics and computer programming aspects of it was coming to play. He was always thinking what the technology would look like in the future. He started writing what he calls the “Voice Manifesto” which is now “Voice First” and it was based upon what he was seeing taking place and what he started to see as a true AI-informed personal assistant.
  • He had to put a lot of that work to the side as the technology in the early 90s wasn’t there to achieve the things he knew they needed to achieve.
  • He went into payments because he developed some of the first point-of-sale systems and later on some of the first payment systems that integrated with online shopping carts.

We are voice first before we are born

Voice First Revolution with Brian Roemmele

The Voice Revolution

  • We are in the embryonic stage of the voice first revolution.
  • Because the computer was so dumb and so slow when it was invented, we had to invent a new way to communicate with it. We developed the keyboard and then the mouse.
  • Steve jobs informed the first major revolution in computer-human interaction with the graphical user interface which liberated the human from having to remember a series of commands to inform a computer to do something.
  • The next liberation was the touchscreen.
  • He had predicted that we would ultimately end up talking to our computers and they would understand us in a very practical way.
  • Voice will be the way we do things.
  • Anybody can increase their creativity by a huge margin just by talking to a recorder while they’re walking around to document their ideas. To be really good at it one can use Siri text-to-speech recording on the iPhone or the Android equivalent.
  • It’s called a revolution because we are finally going to be liberated from being tied to the machine, and being the end project of a Google search. We can find 12 Billion results in a half a second on Google but we still have to sort it out.

Amazon naming their assistant Alexa and Google not naming theirs

  • We tend to anthropomorphize anything that has human characteristics.
  • If it has a female quality voice we are going to call it a “she”
  • The female voice is a voice of authority because it’s the very first sound we hear before and after we are born.
  • When we hear the female voice we assign it authority. Research shows we perk up when we hear our mom’s voice and our mom can command us to do things that no other human can do even at an older age.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Other useful resources:

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