How easy do you find it to recall a conversation? Personally, I can remember quite clearly what I said over a two week period but overtime as human beings we forget. This is the forgetting curve.
In any job within a business having the correct information to hand in a timely fashion can help improve business decision making and competency on the job. This is why I am excited by the recent launch of the Sound Branch Skill for Amazon Alexa and the Google Action for Google Home devices.
How often have you asked Alexa a question to hear the reply “Sorry I don’t know that.” Therein lies the opportunity. Sound Branch allows you to search voice notes with your voice. A combination of elastic search and short form – 10 to 20 second voice data means you can instantly recall and playback important conversations from the past.
For example, you might want to search a private conversation between yourself and a colleague. Or perhaps you have a group discussion in your team and you want to remember who said what. This is all possible because audio clips are short in length and all the audio is transcribed to text with 96% accuracy. This level of accuracy is equal to that of human beings, which means voice search is now a reality.
Now imagine something as boring as the car manual and trying to figure out how to change the oil. Instead of linking to the page in the printed manual, how about voice searching with the Alexa Skill?
Classically in business, they talk about the 30, 60, 90 day plan. What if you could recall all your conversations and play them back from 30, 60 and 90 days. Would this make you more effective in your job? Would this mean you would be less susceptible to forgetting stuff? The ultra organised will say of course not. However listening not only to your own voice but that of other people’s and playing this back several times leads to greater understanding. You might have written something down but got the meaning wrong and therefore misinterpreted the information. The ability to instantly play back and repeat a conversation gives clarity, accountability and greater ownership. Overall it means the task in hand is more likely to get completed whilst keeping all parties happy along the way.
Does voice search mean miscommunication will be eliminated? Not at all but it does give us a greater chance of understanding each other and getting along better. All of this leads to a conducive workforce, a happy workforce and a more productive team. As we all know happy and productive teams tend to win more often!
So a final thought, instead of the printed meeting agenda, you could play back your teams conversations. Your meeting would run smoother as people would not have to think about what they had said, they could simply listen. By reducing the load on your brains, you can utilize them on the more important issues of what next and what is the decision.