Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today we have Tal Florentin. Tal, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me.
Glad to have you. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Yeah, thank you. So I come from the world of software engineering in my background and over the last 15 years or so I spent most of the time around the world of user experience, design. trying to figure out how to optimise the meeting point between human beings and the world of individual interfaces. And over that period of time I’ve designed I think more than 180 different projects for multiple companies in a very wide variety of worlds of content, from gaming to operational systems CRM, platforms, websites, mobile laps and so on.
And over the last a few years, while finding out that the world is going in some specific way, I decided to take the next product design to become my own and build my own company product company. So this is where I built a summary which is basically aimed to help busy people no more and invest less time in doing that. So we’re kind of optimising the meeting point between human beings and knowledge and professional knowledge by helping people. They just, they’re professional content with audio and helping companies communicate with their audience by creating audio channels. So I think my story is basically around meeting between human beings and technology by design.
Well, thank you for that introduction. User experience is an interesting topic and I think lots of companies find that quite a beneficial skill to have. I’d be very interested to hear how you use your user experience skills and apply that to audio that spring to mind there.
Yeah, so I think you know in order to understand where audio becomes a part of the user experience journey, I think you have to go one step backwards before you talk about audio and look at a day in the life of your audience. So as a teacher and lecturer, I always try to explain the statistics and structure about a human being in these days and how this structure actually works and how we are managing our time with the multiple devices that we have around us. And if you look at the different devices that we have, you see that the smartphone is kind of our friend all across the day from the moment we get up until that time we go to sleep and then you get tablet devices which kind of start to disappear a bit.
There were much more dramatically taking a dramatic part over a day before. And as smartphones started to grow physically and become more high quality for reading and so on, they kind of take over tablet devices. So you still see some with tablet devices at the end of the day and then you have the desktop device or my laptop which is the main working station and using while working. So this would usually be your main lot from when you start, I don’t know your work day around 9 a.m. Or so until the end of the day, laptops may bump again in our timeline at the evening. Kind of cover some additional work after kids go to sleep or so. And at the evening you have another device called the TV and you basically stare at Netflix or something like that. And one of you are going to get to sleep first either the TV or you. And basically when you describe all of that, then you ask a question that was kind of my main reason for going towards audio.
So as a speaker and as a service provider I was always trying to stay up to date with everything that’s happening around the world of user experience and the more you understand your experience to understand that everything is connected to user experience technology and design and trends. And I basically have to know everything about everything all the time and feel theology and decision making and cognitive sciences and everything is connected to user experience at the end. And I was having a hard time kind of staying up to date. and that’s where I started trying to figure out how I can optimise my day in order to stay updated. And my problem was that as time goes by a need to know more and read more and there is more content out there and they find a really hard time finding the good content within all of the content that marketing creates for google and not for me, and I found out that something that really helps me. I actually hired somebody to help me read content.
So the method was like this. I hired somebody to be my summariser, so the idea was that whenever I bump into an article, I asked my assistant to read the article and she had to create a summary, a written summary and send it over to me. So then I plan to read the summary and decide whether it’s interesting and then go and read the full article. So we did that for I think three weeks and then I found out that they have 40 Unready Males with summaries from her. So this is basically where I find a found that this is not working for me to optimise what they do and then I had a voice artist and narrator to actually work with us. He started narrating what my assistant summarised and then I got audio files to listen to and then we basically found out that while driving I’m able to consume the content that was actually missing in my day and get to an appointment where I have the information I needed.
Exactly. Kind of optimised to the session I was actually able to go into a classroom as a speaker and teach about things that I actually didn’t treat because somebody else was reading them for him. So this is where I found out that audio is super magical for allowing busy people to get the information they need without spending time in front of a screen. So I think understanding where audio becomes part of the user journey, is understanding where what different context we have in each one of the devices and what goal it has because a lot of content writers for example right or content on their desktop because this is what they do for a living. But then you ask okay let’s switch points of view and look at it from the user point of view which is what user experience always tries to do. And then I ask okay so let’s look at my busy schedule. Please tell me when would you like to actually when would you expect me to digest that content Because when I want smartphone I don’t go too deep into long reading and when I’m my own desk though and they can read I don’t want to read it because I want to be productive in my own work and when I’m in front of Netflix, I’m not going to read anything.
So I’m kind of raising the question: when did you really want me to read that PDFK study that you just sent over which by the way I downloaded, but I don’t have any room for that type of content in my life. And then you start asking about audio. So I guess people are going to listen to our conversation now are going to be doing something else at the same time, they’re not going to stop their day and just stare at something and then listen to that. They’re going to make their time optimised by listening and learning and kind of taking part in our discussion. And then I’m basically trying to take that experience and turn it into something professional. You can actually work with that, not just enjoy as a secondary content. So let’s take your professional knowledge or the content that company wants to share and move it over to death Jenna. And this is where audio fits into the customer journey and the human technology timeline. And then I think when, when you understand that you start asking the right questions such as when would the audio feed my story and my connection with my audience and then you find out by doing that for quite a while we found out for example, I’ll give an example.
I’m always using, let’s take e-commerce, classic e-commerce where you would never bump into audio. You wouldn’t even imagine about thinking about e-commerce meeting podcasts, right? It’s not, it’s kind of, we can talk about e-commerce, but e-commerce wouldn’t be using podcast as part of the buyer journey. So if I’m using the method of kind of checking and testing that user journey on e-commerce, let’s say, I just bought an espresso machine, I wanted to improve my coffee experience. So I went to the espresso shop. I bought my espresso machine, so it will be very technical. I probably went to the Nespresso shop by car because I need to get out with a box and get it home or so. So then you buy your special machine and you’re super happy and then you get to your car and when you get to your car, the main thing that’s interesting for you would be the fact that you just bought your Nespresso machine and are super excited about that.
And then I guess I have around 15 to 30 minutes with you in your car. And then I ask maybe we use that time to talk about the fact that you just what you an espresso machine. You want to actually have a community conversation about that with somebody. But if I keep my classic type of content, which is textual or video, you wouldn’t watch a video while driving and when you get to the next point where your day continues when you get home, you wouldn’t even think about watching that video because it doesn’t fit the rest of your day. And if I would send you a manual tax, your manual, there is no chance you would ever read it. Even though you think that it’s interesting, but we actually missed the right spot where you were super enthusiast about your purchase and you had spare time because it was in your car. So from my point of view, when you look at the user journeys, well, customer journeys, you find out that the missing pieces that we never thought about because they don’t have a screen in front of you are the potential places where you should play when you get out of the shop.
Let’s send you directly to the phone, some kind of playlist that talks about how to use it in a special machine, how to choose your coffee, how we make coffee. What is a limited edition coffee? What do we do when we recycle capsules and other things that wouldn’t be interesting in any way After the 30 minutes where you get home and connect your device. But if it would actually do that, then we would have some kind of an additional experience which fits the story and then the next level of asking what audio and user experience can do together is talking about tone of voice. Because if I would give a professional narrator the text that he wrote, it’s going to be the most boring piece of audio you’ve ever listened to. If you want to make it interesting, then you ask who generator is going to be when I’m going to listen on the car to the story of the espresso machine and then you start looking for the right actor, presenter or whatever it is and kind of talking about tone of voice and storytelling and then it becomes part of your branding.
And this is where it becomes interesting because I think almost no company had this discussion yet, marketing departments didn’t have the meeting where the contact the question is what is going to be our company’s tone of voice on our audio messaging. And I think it’s about time we start having this conversation and thinking where it takes us because or where audio is going to fit our customer journey, what type of content we’re creating and nobody can actually digest because they’re busy and we could help them by turning it into audio. And I think, for me it’s the most interesting question that can be raised because I think text and video, we kind of we understand them, we know what you can do with them and audio. We just don’t know what you can do with audio.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg and we’re just getting started with an uncharted territory, which is kind of super promising and interesting. It’s kind of an endless playground, nobody’s playing at is a great answer. Thank you very much for the thorough answer. I enjoyed, I enjoyed listening to it, which is why I didn’t, but one of the things which I was going to ask you about was, I think you said on your website somewhere that it is clear that audio is going to be bigger than video. And obviously I wanted to ask because video is so big. I wanted to ask you, you know what, you know what your reasons, what you’re, what you’re thinking around that. But I mean, that’s a perfect explanation as to why that may be the case. Um, and then the other thing that when I asked you that question, I kind of expected kind of a tech answer, so some sort of feature or as to why. Um, uh, it might be beneficial for someone to introduce audio into user experience, but you went immediately to what’s in it for them.
And I think it’s worth highlighting because it shows where you’re thinking is about the user’s experience, believe it or not, if I asked you about user experience, you’re actually thinking about the user and yeah, I just thought it was a really, really good point. And um, I mean, you’ve highlighted some really interesting ways of using audio. Do you think of any other ways that it’s, it’s not utilised, where it could be. So recently I tried to kind of, while doing what we do and trying to promote the education around this uncharted territory of audio, I, I wrote an e-book about where audio can work with you. Uh, and it’s funny because I wrote an e-book and we just explain for seven minutes why nobody’s going to ever read it. So, so just to be aligned with our idea, we also recorded playlists with the different chapters of that. But when I started to create a list of where you should, you can actually combine audio in your journey and what are things you can do with it.
I think I listed 22 ideas. I haven’t seen almost any of them around. So I’m not sure I remember all of them by heart and I’ll be happy to share that. The book would with everybody who’s interested in that. But I think I think that from my point of view, the way of thinking about where audio is going to be relevant for you comes from the death user experience. customer journey discovery process. So, if you ask your audience or customer is and what relationships you have with them and what motivations you have, I think, and you’ll check the timeline and what interactions you have with them. You’re basically help you basically find the answer for that. It’s there. It’s kind of this is the way to find the right answer. So if you have, I don’t know your speaker and you have students, then maybe after the talk that you had, you can send a summary of that.
If I talk about things I do with students in some cases, my students created an audio summary of my sessions and create a playlist of everything you need to know about kind of the information we studied. If you talk about a doctor who is just I visited the doctor, the doctor gave me instructions. I probably didn’t understand half of that and I was so tense that I missed most of what they just said. If you would record it and send it over, I would have it and I could actually repeat listening to that and using that and I can also give it to somebody else to listen to and help me digest that. And it would take 10 seconds for the doctor because they actually said that out loud. So they just had to record it and send it over as part of their service. So then you think about the last meeting summary. If you have a company and you have content that you have a meeting and there’s a decision making at the end, maybe we should record it and upload the decision making part for everybody who wasn’t there to actually digest that by listening to that because if I’ll send the summary and email, nobody will read it because everybody has so much email to read it.
And I think when you look at timelines, you find so many alternatives and options to do that. And when you talk about content, then you see that, you know, our classic content goes to, we create blog posts and then we create white papers, case studies, e books and so on. All of that can have its audio layer on top of that. Not instead of that. In addition to that, we can actually offered the idea of maybe you don’t want to read that, Maybe you want to listen to that and has that opportunity. But let me give you another type of kind of one plus one. The conversation that we have now would be an episode of the podcast and currently what you have on the podcast world is being able to follow podcast that you’re familiar with and you appreciate their content. so, so I’m saying let’s look for a marketing point of view and think of a different type of content.
What if the company wouldn’t try to create your own podcast, which is super hard and requires a talent and enthusiasm and consistency and budget and it doesn’t usually have a very specific RI around that were actually, but everybody knows what’s in it for the company. So what if we would curate other people’s content. So you would create the perfect playlist of everything you need to know about audio marketing and it would be a list of episodes from specific other podcasts and would put it on your website. So then I think an interesting point that’s starting to grow in the world of audio content. Is that currently we see the creators and consumers. I think one layer that’s going to grow is the curator between them. It’s kind of, I want to listen to what you listen to. So you tell me what I need to know about my profession and this, kind of a curation of multiple episodes coming from different sources and being the one finding them for you and recommending is another added value.
So being able to create the right content and not just to create it is another layer that I think it can go to branded audio content. And I think we’re just getting, we don’t see that yet. So we almost don’t follow a curator to listen to podcasts. You try to find the podcast that you’re interested in. So, again, a completely different area, but it goes back to your ability to provide information. Have you given any thought to the fact that with video, there’s, you know, YouTube, massive dominant company in that space and with text, there’s google uh, with audio, I mean, nothing really springs to mind in terms of the place that people go to immediately for audio. Have you given any thought to that? So, I think, first of all, I think the answer would be on text or google, there’s google on video, there’s YouTube on TV, there’s Netflix and on audio there’s Spotify being super kind of simplifying everything and I think Spotify did a very big turn in what they do and they don’t just focus on music, they also focus on content and podcasts, which is kind of, it happened over the last two years or so, not more than that.
They basically understood that audio is bigger than music and still I think that the discovery process and 45 is very different. The discovery process you have on YouTube or Facebook or google and I think there is no owner for that type of content. But I think what, what we are expected to see, if you look at google search results for example, you would see a missing tub, you have results in text, you have results in the video, you have results in news products, uh, whatever, you don’t have the audio tab under search results. So from my point of view, I’m pretty sure audio is going to appear on the cabs of the results of google in order to allow you that type of behaviour. But coming from a research point of view saying I’m not looking for a video, I’m looking for an audio because I have some spare time on my car and I want to know new things about how to implement audio marketing or so whatever.
So I think we should definitely expect the existing players to start playing with audio as well. But you mentioned YouTube and this is kind of an interesting thing, one of the business models of YouTube, is actually audio because if you think about what their premium services they’re offering you the ability to actually listen to content without watching without having any screen active. I know many, many people who go to YouTube, not for the video, but just for the audio. So they basically don’t allow you to listen to while the smartphone loses focus even though it’s one check box in the app development, you know, people, people assumed when, when we launched our audio channels, people, people said it’s amazing that we can actually listen while the phone is losing focus. How come, how did you do that? So I’m saying this is how it works unless you uncheck the checkbox, which is amazing.
So you do what they did is unchecked the check box and say, oh, you want to listen to that and not watch, it’s not good for us because then we don’t have the visual ads. So go to premium and chaos. So amazingly, YouTube enjoys their premium services by supporting the ability to actually listen to video instead of watching them. And then, and then by the way you go to video courses, take all of the video course platforms you have ever met and check the statistics of how many people actually watched the videos. So if you talk about learning how to code, I actually need my full attention and the screen and watching something. But if I if this is a kind of a conceptual lecture, I don’t need the speaker to actually stand in front of me. So I think audio learning is again, the world is going to be to be growing because audio production is much less hard and expensive than video production.
And then then you ask yourself, why did I actually, you know, uh, take all the video team that’s here. If nobody watches that, So why didn’t I just buy a smart a microphone and kind of edited it. It would take, it would be much easier. And also I think it’s, it’s much harder to be authentic on video. I can tell you that I’m teaching and I’m having lecture. If you put a camera in front of me, I’m completely a different person. I kind of can’t communicate.
You mean sort of camera shy? Is that what you mean?
Yeah, I don’t know what it is because I’m not shy. But the family changes everything. It’s kind of, you actually behave differently when it’s there takes a lot of practice. Yeah. Then you’re not natural and we’ll lose your authenticity with what you wanted to bring through the favour authenticity yourself and you’re not yourself where there’s a camera unless you’re a very good actor and which most people are.
Yeah, there’s a lot of people talking about audio command. Have you got any thoughts there or any other future trends?
So I have to say that looking from for trends, it’s kind of I we see that when you have kind of futuristic films showing strength, things that are going to happen, usually you see that we still continue to do what we did before, but maybe the more advanced way. So I think voice commands when I’m listening to audio while driving, having my platform, allowing me to say next back save, send would be so much easier for me to kind of manage my navigation across the content or even find something similar to that because this was very interesting or kind of communicate around the discovery because you’re not active.
So I think this is where voice commands are totally going to be relevant for us. But when we look at things like Alexa and other platforms, you see that at the end there are kind of stuck in doing very basic things and they’re not really changing our lives. We’re kind of completing small tasks in our lives. So, so from my point of view, I’m much less dramatic about future, it’s kind of pretty much the same, but a bit more organised and optimised from for your activity. And I think audio consumption as a secondary thing is something that is not solved because if I have to click on the button to move to the next item on my playlist, I was actually interrupted and it should be totally second day. I think this is white platforms like Clubhouse provide a fully hands free experience unless by the way, somebody calls you and then you have to move into, I’m on stage, I have to click on the bottom or not and kind of fight with it for a second.
Well, you mentioned google who are or at some stage maybe adding an additional audio tab. Do you think that the other social media platforms will also be getting into audio? It’s interesting, I think they’re struggling back and forth with that because what we see recently is that once club out became a thing, all of the other platforms copied and launched their similar clubhouse related platforms, so you have it and tweet twitter and in other platforms, but I think it’s kind of, it fights the original reason of how and why the platform exists because Facebook is built on active interaction and full attention and if you move your eyes out, they actually lose what they try to achieve. And I think they have some kind of an inner fight with themselves, so maybe it will be another platform by Facebook which is audio oriented. it would be totally interesting to explore that.
And now when all of the other platforms actually create their own version of clubhouse, so you don’t have a go to place because all of the places are go to places. And I think the problem is where if now I want to be in a room in an audio room with somebody, Clubhouse is the answer. And since it’s probably not good enough and everybody’s going to fight with it, it would be, there won’t be a go to place, which does that, all other platforms will be the go to place to do that. But then the reason you got to that platform is not yet. So I guess in some places it’s going to become the main thing and in others is going to be irrelevant because nobody would do that. And it’s kind of super interesting to explore how this timeline changes because I think over the last 18 months, the category of audio, social, audio, something live, whatever it is, I started to kind of happen. So we’re watching it become something and it’s super interesting to see where it goes.
I think what happened mainly – and this is interesting – because I have these endless discussions with digital managers, marketers and so on over the last few years. So, so we actually see the communication with them changes over time. So if you talked about audio with the marketing manager two years ago, I think two years ago, they would say isn’t the audio the past or aren’t you in the video era. And then one year later, if this would be one year ago or a bit more than that? They would say, okay, I understand audio, but we don’t want to create a podcast. So audio equals podcasts and then clubhouse basically change and change the equation because they understand that it’s a category because it has to, things you can do with it. And then what you say, you say podcast is irrelevant for us, clubhouse is irrelevant for us. But you understand that there are other options.
So I think what’s going to happen is that this category is going to kind of grow with other ways and then we’re going to find out that there are different things you can do with it. And once you understand that artist and things you can do with it automatically. Marketing wants to get there. That was actually going to be my next question. So let’s say I liked the on your website, you’ve got like an image and it’s got three lanes and there’s one for video 14 texts and the lanes are basically stacked up with traffic loads of cars on the, in those lanes and then there’s an audio lane and it’s completely empty for you to drive through. And I loved it being a metaphor for how, um, it’s early for anyone who wants to get onto audio. And so let’s say you have a conversation with someone and they’re like, you know, I totally agree with what you’re saying, um, it’s a great time to get into audio, but what do I do as a businessperson, what do I do for the benefit of my company?
So I think it starts with one of one of the hard things we have from the other point of view of that is that usually, you know, how companies want to be innovative until they have to actually be innovative. And then they are kind of stuck and they say, can you send me somebody who did that before? And I said, didn’t you say one of the innovative? And then they say, yeah, but, but I would be very happy to be innovative after somebody else, whether before me. So, so it’s funny to see how this discussion goes. Uh, but I think as a business, uh, you would start to, to figure out what, uh, what information would be relevant and what discussion would like to have with your audience and what are your KPIs that you try to achieve and then you find out that people don’t do what you do because they’re crowded. They have too much under plate. So, it’s relevant, for example, in conferences.
So, if you have a live conference and I’m actually there for one day, I’m actually enjoying and I have my full attention and I’m able to watch speakers and so on. But if you send me the video of the, a day later on, I’m not going to have that day, so I’m not going to be able to dive into the information. So whenever you look at your content, you create or your activity and you find people who have too much on their plates. This is where audio becomes something to talk about or think about, uh, and not just podcasts, which are kind of conversational and completing your awareness or I would say your content strategy, but mainly creating content for your audience, which is relevant for them. So either you create content or you use other people’s content. One of things we do, I’ll give you two interesting examples. One of things that we do is create audio channels of summarised articles.
So we curate the articles that’s relevant for the brand and generate them and create an audio summary. So it’s, in some cases it’s a content hub for marketing purposes and in other cases it’s an internal communication with the company for workers. So kind of uh, company branding, think employer branding efforts to actually raise the value of the company for the worker by providing more information for them to be better what they do. Uh, but I’ll give you another example, which is super innovative. It happened, we launched a channel two weeks ago with the local electricity’s provider and what they did is they decided that they want to have their there, the positions that they post on their worker employer hiring, they want to do something that this is really innovative. They decided that instead of just writing the details of the position in kind of a text based, they want the hiring manager to record themselves sharing what they look for and what is the kind of what is a day in the life of working there.
And we actually started a project which is really strange, we go to professionals in the electricity company and we asked them, can you record yourself talking for something like one minute or two minutes about what’s your department doing? What how are they in the life of the department looks like and what you’re looking for, who is the person you’re looking to hire. And then they started recording, it’s interesting because some of them are better and some of them are worst in being that kind of and by the way it’s related to the fact that we started by writing the text for that and then they were actually iterating it, I think it would be in some cases better if they didn’t right, they were just saying it out loud. but then you actually think about the situation where you’re looking for a job and instead of just watching text and kind of keeping things kind of formal, you actually click on playing, you listen to the voice of your future employer. So it’s such an icebreaker and such a kind of game changer on the interaction and automatically you feel much comfortable communicating with the company because you kind of feel like there are human beings there and they kind of like you and they have a voice and they have kind of they mistake while writing what they were reading what they wrote.
So they’re kind of, it kind of breaks the ice even before you started the hiring process. So, I think audio in some cases is magical. It can actually bring you to situations and being real human beings to the front and then you take it to you know, customer recommendations on your e commerce website. You never believe somebody if they write this product is amazing. I love it. You’re sure that it’s a family member of the owner, right? But if you click on play and you’ll see an image and to fit the tone of voice that you hear, it’s going to be super emotional. If we’re going to get directly to your kind of to create trust and make you believe, and I think audio has something to do with the complicity and trust. And then when you have a tool that creates authenticity and trust, then figure out what you can do with it. It’s kind of endless really. A couple of great examples. I 100% agree about the testimonials as well.
I mean, you can fill those out yourself if it’s just a, you know a bunch of stars and review. And in regards to the job description, I can imagine that the audio is going on for quite some time if you’re talking about a day in the life of and what they should expect and what the job involves. Whereas if you were to transcribe that and put it into text, I mean that would be quite a few pages, you know maybe thousands of words maybe which no one will read. But plenty of people would listen to the audio. So I can imagine you getting a better quality of candidate and I don’t know there are, I had a conversation recently about the job description and how you can actually get someone into the company where they actually don’t know what their job description is and you can actually solve some of those problems with audio.
So great examples. The amazing thing about that is that it fits the, it’s not just for fun and being creative, it fits the KPI is that you find for what you need you need to reduce the effort spent in finding the right person you want to make the company look like more appealing place to work with. So we want better candidates. you want the process to be more focused so irrelevant. People will not send their information because they and when you people actually listen to the requirements there more focused on whether they’re relevant or not, and it starts to show the effect from KPI point of view. So, so there’s efficiency around that and so on. So everything kind of goes where it needs to go, and you can measure it from a very technical, logical analytical point of view, and this is where I really like it because it connects to at the end, if you go, if you go back to user experience is experiencing, that is not just to create a user experiences, it’s in order to fit what your business needed to achieve by understanding human beings and creating a better interactions with them.
So I think this is where audio becomes a tool that supports what you wanted to achieve, and you can actually measure it and see results that affect what you try to achieve and you didn’t have the stool on your list before. Well you’ve certainly convinced me anyway, and I think, I don’t know, maybe I’ll save it the next time we hire, I think I might do a little audio thing and send it over to you so that you can have a look because I think you made a really good, really good point. There, Is there anything that you feel that is worth mentioning and valuable to the conversation which I haven’t asked you about? So there’s so much around all of this conversation. I think I would mention one more thing we talked about tone of voice. So in some cases you ask whether a professional voice actor should do the voice. and whether they should narrate it from written text or it should be me. And I think one of the things we bumped into is the fact that we wanted bloggers to start adding audio version on top of their blog.
So you could basically either listen or read. And then we saw that bloggers really have hard time recording themselves because there are texts oriented people. So then we thought instead of asking them to buy microphones and kind of editing stuff, what if we create a recorder app for them, Which is connecting automatically to their website and kind of, they can record and upload it automatically. And it takes two minutes. And we really worked hard in order to optimise the quality of sound because we try to compete with professional studios and we were able to go that far because if you report while having headphones, they kind of eliminated a lot of noise. So it’s pretty good. But the first day I actually launched it and I tested it, we’re going, I was going with my wife to a restaurant and we were actually in a restaurant and there was a lot of noise and music and bar noises and glasses and so on.
And then I recorded it and then I played and I found out that it’s that the other, you kind of look at the axis of professionalism. So one side is very professional and the other side is not nonprofessional. It’s kind of more authentic where you get the scene. So in many podcasts, editors try to create a scene by adding voice effects and sound effects and so on. So then I found out that I was actually recording the situation and what I recorded was you got to the full situation with the noises on the background and so on. So yeah, so it totally became a very authentic moment where you were actually with me on the restaurant so you can actually shut your eyes and be with me there for a second. So I think another point of view that’s worth thinking about is is kind of that point of authenticity of bringing yourself and being able to actually you know stop for a second. professional actor.
Voice actors always ask if they would like me if it’s okay for them to breathe, which is super funny because I am an employee as an employer think that it would be correct to allow my people working to breathe under work. But it’s funny then you find out that once they actually cough or speak out as they are correct centre that they started and go on and restate and you don’t cut it away, you get a very authentic version of them and it’s much more appealing and fun to listen to, then something which sounds like a robot and kind of reduces the reality of the person behind the scenes. So I think this is something that audio still tries to be really professional and I think it has a very interesting insight in not being professional but being authentic. And in many cases I’m willing to pay the price of quality in order to get the authenticity. So, that’s another point worth mentioning.
So, if I can’t come to read your blog or listen, I would like to listen to you and not to an aerator reading the blog post because I think getting to you is listen to you, listening to you is basically the person of branding and kind of, I wanted to get the person the original source of that. Um, I think that’s true of audible as well. People like to hear the author verses a professional voiceover artist and also I think podcasts have been responsible for that as well. So the most popular podcasts tend to be the ones where you’re getting the real person, you’re not getting like a, a formal professional version of that person because it’s about the connection, right? Apparently, this is where it becomes hard for companies to create a podcast because they don’t have that person.
So again, an interesting insight about authenticity and bringing that professional voice to the stage. So what your goals for Summurai?
So I think we want to do two main things. One of them is to become the go to place for companies to create an audio channel. I think when you, when you get to the point where you understand that audio is interesting, then you ask yourself. Okay, so let’s say we recorded that content. Where do we put it? So you say, I can put it on the podcast platforms, but it’s irrelevant. It’s not a podcast, it’s an operational list of information you need after you purchase your Nespresso, it’s not a podcast material. It would be strange. So maybe we put widget and audio widget on our website, which is kind of really strange and not optimised. And then you find out that you need an audio platform, which is basically something you don’t have today. So our goal to strategies is that to become your audio branded audio channel where you put a manager and learn statistics about your audio. And uh, this is one point of view and the other is to continue and find ways to provide embedded elements that fit your existing activity.
So for example, we’re going to launch a component called Later this month, which is basically allowing you to get to a blog post and instead of reading it, send it to Later, which is the full sentences read now if we can play there. So the idea is to turn the visitor into a lead and allow them to listen later on, and then we can also correct her an engagement and kind of start the communication with that. And I think we would like to become the one stop shop for everything branded audio. And later on even manage the content and become the go to place to look for content, or short form audio at least.
Yeah, there’s a lot to do. You’re gonna be a busy man, hopefully Tal. Where’s the best place for people to find you?
So I guess most of the platforms – LinkedIn, Facebook, email, whatever pretty responsive. And the website is www.summurai.com.
So it’s a mix of summurai and summary warriors. This is the logic behind the name because I would like to create summurais in order to fight for the time of our audience. It’s a cool domain, isn’t it?
Thank you for your time today. You provided a lot of value.
Thank you so much for having me.