In this episode, Teri was interviewed on The Savvy Social Podcast by the host, Andrea Jones. The podcast is all about social media and social media marketing in particular, and Teri had the opportunity to join the host to talk about flash briefings and voice technology; and how they can be used for marketing.

Enjoy!

Voice Technology

  • This is the future of computing, social marketing and everything related to technology.
  • Before voice technology, computer technology required users to use some kind of hardware device to be able to communicate with the technology.
  • This technology is friction-less, seamless and convenient. Computers are adapting to the way that we naturally communicate.
  • Amazon just launched a dozen new products and announced that they will be putting their Alexa voice technology into everything from microwaves, clocks, and other gadgets.
  • All the major companies are seeing this as the future of technology.
  • It’s much more efficient when you look at the number of words that people can type per minute versus the number of words that a person can speak per minute.
  • The adoption of smart speakers has been quicker than the adoption of mobile phones ever was.

Ongoing Developments

  • The technology may not replace things like text, type and swipe 100%. We are moving into a world that will be “voice first”, not “voice only”.
  • There is a lot of work geared towards ensuring the technology incorporates the different languages and accents. Google and Amazon create complete language models.
  • Voice technology developers are focused on ensuring that the language models in voice assistants can fit into different locations.

Amazon and Google

  • They are the major players in voice technology. They are battling it out. Amazon does not sell Google products, and Google restricted Amazon from showing YouTube videos on their Alexa video devices.
  • Google has the search engine structure behind it which is great for looking up information. Voice technology will change the way people do searches. The single top search result is going to be worth so much more in voice because that’s what a user will be given when they do a search.
    Google has been trying to optimize things for voice search.
  • Amazon is consumer oriented and they are going after the smart home space. They have developed strong partnerships with Microsoft and they are also looking into other ways to search.
  • Amazon is putting a large chunk of resources into their voice technology. They are hiring more people to work on Alexa than Google is in their entire organization.

The Marketability of Voice First Technology and Flash Briefings

  • Voice technology is the beginning of a brand new era of computing.
  • Now is the time for people that are looking for opportunities to get in on early marketing on a new platform.
  • Marketing through a flash briefing: This is the prime real estate of voice.
  • People can subscribe to flash briefings through Amazon, and Google has their own version of that called News Briefs.
  • A flash briefing is a way to get to the ears of listeners when one is promoting something, just like a podcast or blog.

Creating a Flash Briefing

  • Decide on your topic. Figure out where you’re going to serve your audience the best.
  • Make sure that there is enough content on that topic to be able to do the flash briefing on a daily basis. Consistency is very important. Nobody will want to subscribe to a flash briefing that is there one day and gone the next day.
  • Try recording an episode and see if you like it.
  • Decide where you’re going to host your audio files, similar to a podcast.
  • Register as an Amazon developer.
  • Create a skill. A skill is to Alexa what an app is to the mobile phone.
  • Once you’ve uploaded your audio files to your host, take the RSS feed and copy/paste it into the skill console where you’ve set up the skill on Amazon.
  • Beta test it and submit it to Amazon for review.

Length of Flash Briefings

  • Shorter is better! They can be up to 10 minutes or longer, but the lesser the minutes the better. Teri’s flash briefings only go up to 2 minutes.

Final Thoughts

  • Right now there is a huge white space in voice technology.
  • When creating a flash briefing, it’s good to have some kind of audio branding.

List of resources mentioned in this episode:

Other Useful Resources

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