Sound Branch makes it easy for people to communicate from anywhere in the world, whenever it’s convenient for them.

Check out this infographic where we list the top features that make Sound Branch the best team communication app.

Sound Branch Top Features

• Branded Voice Sites – 50% of all search will be voice by 2020
• Audio Intranets – a richer communication experience for staff
• Invite Only or Self Registration for new users
• Private Groups for secure invite only conversations
• One-to-One Chat – take conversations off-line
• Audio Transcription to Text for powerful search including voice search of voice
• Mobile Apps for iOS and Android meaning you can access on any device, anywhere
• Audio Profiles and testimonials – gain credibility through spoken word reviews
• Conversational Analytics for better decision-making – includes wordle diagrams based of frequency of words used and who has listen to what
• Alexa Skills and Google Actions for Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers
• Audio Slideshows with voice notes and photographs for presentations
• Gatherings for just-in-time meetings so that every meeting starts on time and always has meeting minutes transcribed automatically
• AWS Cloud Hosted hence scalable reliable and secure
• Notifications – Instantly get notified of new voice messages

Schedule a free demo today.

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

It’s difficult to read so many articles, blogs and news these days. There are moments in the day where you cannot sit down and read. This is why audio consumption has increased 75% in the past two years.

To meet this demand, you need to take your written blogs and convert them into audio. This will help you to increase your audio discoverability by posting clips to iTunes and Alexa. Your audio can be played in connected cars when people drive.

By giving people another way to access your content while on the go you will boost engagement and revenue.

Conversational analytics also give you insights as to what people are saying and who is listening to what. You can then ascertain what type of content people care about and what you should write more about.

We are at the beginning of the audio revolution! Contact us to learn more or visit soundbranch.com .

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

Half of Americans listen to online audio weekly. This is not surprising given the rise of smart speakers and smartphones.

By making your content available in audio, you help your website’s visitors to consume your content easier as they just need to press play. Listening to audio whilst commuting, for example, is invaluable.

All businesses are blogging but not all businesses are creating podcasts, therefore, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace.

More than half of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget in the next 12 months. Converting your content to audio will have an impactful ROI for your business.

On-demand audio via audio blogs is on a growth curve. Get started by turning your blogs into podcasts on Sound Branch.

Signed up for free today at soundbranch.com and create your own branded audio site.

Author Bio

Sean Gilligan is a UK based entrepreneur and author of the book “Flexible”. Sean for the last 15 years has run Webanywhere in Chicago, Leeds and Katowice Poland. Sean is number 67 in the Worldwide Listing of Corporate Learning Movers & Shakers 2018. Sean is a bootstrapper and has not taken on outside capital to grow Webanywhere in 3 countries and has recently founded Ventures Anywhere his start up arm which includes Sound Branch.

My MacBook alerted me today to clear up some space on my hard drive. In looking at the larger files, I played an old video of my son when he was a baby and it brought a tear to the eye. In the end, I didn’t delete these large clunky videos as they are very important to me. iCloud and Google photographs are growing whilst we are rapidly building up a digital archive of our friends, families and close ones. Cloud storage is a buoyant market because we take so many photographs and videos we run out of space on our mobile phones. This explosion hasn’t happened with audio. We tend to take lots of videos and photographs but very little audio footage.

Why is it, then, that we take less audio recordings compared to photographs and videos? Admittedly, if you’ve got a quality video you don’t need the audio footage. However, lots of video opportunities are missed because people don’t feel comfortable on camera. It might be the lighting is not appropriate, or the dress attire of a person is unsuitable. We all want to look our best on camera and there are certain moments in time which are completely missed because we don’t want to be photographed and we most certainly don’t want to be filmed. These moments in time are not captured and are forgotten.

This is where audio comes in. Audio offers some of the benefits of video without the video editing headaches. It’s actually very cheap to create high quality sound recordings and audio ages much better. Think back to all the films you’ve watched in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, there’s a distinct style to these films and you can probably guess the decade based on the fashions of the times and the video technology available. Overtime video technology has got better and better with animated masterpieces such as Toy Story and virtual reality video production. All of this, however, is very expensive to capture and produce!

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t tell a 1950s wireless radio audio quality from that of the Dolby Digital surround sound. But generally, it is more difficult to guess when audio was recorded than when videos were filmed.

In the instances where you could choose either audio or video, you should always choose audio. It is quicker to produce and will last longer. Unless you are archiving history videos, need to reproduce videos every three years or more dependent on the pace of change in your industry.

You can also multitask when you consume audio which you can’t do once glued to a flat screen! Although most people don’t record audio notes and share these, I see this as an area for growth. Just as the mobile phone camera has led to the explosion of cloud storage for photos and videos. Smart speakers will bring about massive growth in our audio digital footprint.

The extreme case will be once we pass away, our loved ones, friends and families, with the permissions to do so, will be able to listen to some of our thoughts.

Whilst that might be uncomfortable for some people the ability to listen to what my great great great grandparents thought and their shared history it’s something I think many families would appreciate. In a business context listening to the life of Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie and other greats would give us all some extra wisdom!

When I first got on the property ladder and started living in my own flat by myself the sense of independence and achievement was fantastic. Of course, I had lots of friends in the city and through sports and social I had lots of people and a sense of belonging. When I wasn’t with my friends and family for long periods of several days or sometimes weeks there was a sense of loneliness.

Loneliness comes in all shapes and sizes. There’s lots of loneliness in society due to all sorts of social and economic reasons. Indeed, we can talk about all sorts of less fortunate and disadvantaged people in our society and the causes and effects of loneliness. However, I want to focus on the baby boomers.

According to Connect2Affect, more than 8 million Americans over 50 are affected by isolation, which is a “growing health epidemic”. Therefore, it’s interesting to see how voice recognition devices for the home could help to combat loneliness for vulnerable elderly people.

Amazon’s Alexa can be used for the daily news briefing, finding out the weather and the time. It is all good and well for entertainment. More interesting is how friends and family can stay in touch with the ageing population whether that might be checking on whether they’ve taken their medicines that day or simply asking how they are getting on.

Age UK found that 3.6 million older people live alone, 2 million of whom are 75 or over. Additionally, 1.9 million older adults frequently feel invisible or ignored. These feelings of loneliness can greatly impact a person’s wellbeing, but may be worse for seniors who struggle to interact socially on a regular basis.

Voice assistants are being increased in use within the health care system. This might be to create a healthcare audit for reporting purposes. Or, it could be to reduce administration time in the back office so that nurses can attend patients more timely. It could be a way in which care homes interact with both the patients but also the wider family on difficult decisions.

Some families live away from their elderly parents and find it difficult to stay in touch with the nursing professionals. Voice messaging can give a greater customer service to the patient and peace of mind to the wider family and loved ones.

There are still certain matters that would be impractical and inappropriate to use voice messaging such as patient confidentiality. You wouldn’t want an elderly patient broadcasting in the living room to other patients with their healthcare issues. You would, however, want loved ones to know of an elderly patient taking a fall and of bad news you want to be delivered early.

The reality is that more often nurses are busy nursing and aren’t manning the phones so voicemail and callbacks are prevalent in nursing homes. Whilst getting a call back from a secretary is okay it’s not as good as getting a voice note from the carer themselves to the family.

So whilst voice messaging comes useful through Alexa Skills and the Amazon Echo and other such devices, there are big opportunities between the nursing professionals and connecting them in a new way to the wider family. By doing this you can drive the productivity of low value admin whilst increasing the levels of service to patients as they grow old.

We will all grow old at some point and in our latter years having a more connected carers network with wider families whether that’s meals on wheels, social workers, nurses or doctors this can only be a good thing for both the patient and the carer.

In this article, we’re going to show you how to use voice messaging on any device with the best team communication app in the market.

Trending Voice Messaging Apps

Many popular social media platforms, such as Whatsapp and Messenger, provide built-in voice messaging features (also known as push-to-talk) that allow you to record and send a voice message within seconds.

This is a great way to communicate with colleagues, friends and family as push-to-talk messages are more intimate and sophisticated than the typical poorly spelt text. You also feel much closer after hearing someone’s voice than you would after reading an SMS.

Rise of Voice Assistants

According to a report from Juniper Research, smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home, and the Sonos One will be installed in over 70 million US households by 2022, reaching 55% of all homes. This means that a voice revolution is coming and people will start using speech to communicate more than text.

Finding an app that uses voice messaging on any device can be a challenge. Whatsapp, for example, is a great communication app but you can only use it on your smartphone. You can’t access your messages online and this, sometimes, is frustrating when your phone is out of battery, for instance.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could just login to an online account to listen and reply to your messages when you are at work? Logistics businesses that need to keep the communication going between drivers and teams in the office would really benefit from this.

How to Use Voice Notes

Sound Branch is a unique voice notes app, available on Google Play and Apple App Store, that uses a standalone website for users. This way, you can access all your messages on the web but most importantly you can send voice messages and create communication groups. It looks like Gmail for voice.

To get started with Sound Branch, simply look for it on your Apple App Store if you are using an iPhone, or on Google Play for Android users.

1. Download the app
2. Create a personal or business account
3. Invite friends / colleagues to join

Once you have created your account, you can access it on the web on soundbranch.com.

Sending a voice message is effortless, just follow these steps:

1. Tap and hold the microphone and start speaking.
2. Name your audio clip.
3. If you wish you can add an image and/or a link by tapping the relevant icon.
4. Tap ‘Post’ and you’re done.

Voice communication is not only great for individuals but for businesses too as it requires the receiving party to respond or engage with the message. It helps you to make a good impression and find commonalities with current or prospective clients too.

If you’d like a free demo of Sound Branch for business, please get in touch at hello@soundbran.ch.

With Moore’s law, computing power has improved over the years and this has accelerated the rate of change in technology. Once computers used to fill research centres and entire rooms, now small chips fit into smart watches.

Whilst artificial intelligence has improved, the human brain is still far superior. That’s not to say that artificial intelligence isn’t catching up, it’s just if you try to have an intellectual conversation with Amazon Alexa you’re not going to get that far.

So, if wisdom and knowledge are your people’s heads how do you better extract that information? We all know that people contributing with their opinions and thoughts make some feel part of the decision-making process and the business journey. Survey monkey and other similar tools are useful or less personal ways of gathering people’s opinions.

In this bottom-up management approach, the leaders of the business serve the employees who are closest to the customers. In fact, the hierarchy of your business is flipped with management serving the frontline staff. The basis for this is that your staff serving the customers probably know more about the realist use at the coalface than senior management does in the Ivory Towers.

Making better decisions means that you have all the facts and data on hand. If this is real time then that’s awesome but a close second is to have this information just-in-time. You can provide Town Hall speeches and have interactive workshops and these sessions have their place. Such large-scale meetings are very costly to businesses and therefore only happen once in a blue moon.

So if SurveyMonkey is less personable and large-scale face-to-face meetings are too costly where is the middle ground? You still want to hear people voicing their emotions and thoughts.

This is where transcribe voice messaging comes in. It converts voice notes into text which are then searchable. If you get all your staff contributing to the big issues of the day and indeed big opportunities you can quickly brainstorm and reach a consensus based on the wisdom of the crowd. As they say, if it looks like it’s fish and smells like a fish it’s probably a fish. If all your staff are saying the same thing then the board can listen to this and take the appropriate action.

Business intelligence based on substantive data which is not just numeric but also raw with emotion can give you the strategic competitive advantage. You need the numbers but you also need the stories behind the numbers.

So what do you need to do in order to make this happen? The reality is people are already using voice notes in their personal lives. In Argentina and China, most people use voice notes over text because it’s simply quicker given the Chinese typeface.

With the rise of voice-based technology such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant coupled with the popularity of podcasts, people are becoming more accepting to recording their voice. Many businesses record calls for training purposes in any case. The only real habitual change is using a business base messenger to record people’s voices.

One way of getting people to share their voices is for them to do a morning brief and debrief on a daily basis. Voice notes can be done in short snippets which might be 10 seconds or 20 seconds in length. The voice data is immediately converted to text and is searchable. Then, management teams can use conversational analytics such as door graphs, which make the most popular words appear very large on screen.

Looking at conversational analytics, the more popular a word becomes the more clues and red flags get obtained, which helps to direct the team straight to the issues. Just adding search engine optimisation importance of keywords is needed for your website to appear high up in the Google ranks. Keywords of the conversations across your business allow you to think about where you need to invest more of your money. Perhaps the London office is coming up a lot in your reporting. Is that because the London office is doing particularly well or is there high staff attrition there? It might be that particular competitor’s name is coming up quite often in a particular area!

You don’t know what you don’t know. The biggest assumptions businesses make is to find the problem. Where the friction is in business is where the opportunity is. Therefore more intelligence around the quality of conversation in your business will lead to better decision-making, period.

If you’re interested in learning more you can sign up for free as an individual or as a premium account, available for teams.

Simply click the link below and sign up for free today to start trialing voice messaging.

SoundBranch.com

Digital disruption is happening in all businesses and sectors. Digital innovators are a threat to all established businesses which means traditional companies need to change. A perfect storm is happening in the property market with digital challenger eroding fee margins and stamp duty rising, leading people moving homes less over the course of their lifetime.

When we bought our new house we were very much in the traditional model. We appointed an estate agent, valuation is carried out, a price agreed and the property is advertised. We were very fortunate to sell our property in a short space of time but as you all know selling and buying properties is one of the most stressful experience people can endure. When housing chains break and process run longer, this uncertainty can damage the customer experience.

Now, housing chains will always exist but the slowness of lawyers to respond or even talk to their opposing solicitors hasn’t changed for decades. Digital technology is now making these tolerable norms less acceptable. The speed of technology and innovation is now allowing traditional business models and processes to be challenged and improved.

Telephone tennis quite often happens in the buying cycle of acquiring a new home. Vendors missing calls to law firms, and the estate agent is holding all of this together, being a skilled negotiator but also a councilor in certain instances to families!

Estate agents need to manage many locations and have to train their staff on the latest compliance and regulatory standards. This can be a challenge when busy estate agents are undertaking viewings, traveling between appointments or simply manning the phones. Making communication and indeed learning more efficient and effective will not only benefit your employees and your customers, but also you.

In the future, buyers of properties will be able to say, “Alexa What new houses are up for sale in my area?” or “Alexa play the latest Estate Agent News”. Voice controlled devices such as the Amazon Echo can make the customer experience delightful. For example, an elderly member of the public selling their property might be introduced to an estate agent’s voice before a face to face visit for reassurance. It could be playing back the voice message that your offer has been accepted by the vendor, so you can recap and remember what has been said.

Sound Branch is the first short form voice notes app to market and has particular advantages for estate agents.

• Voice messaging can be done on your desktop PC or Mac and using mobile apps or voice controlled smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo
• Voice messages can improve internal communication leading to less emails and less unnecessary meetings
• Audio can be played back in your CRM through integrations
• Alexa Skills can be built, so your company news and information can be played by customers on the smart speakers.

You can learn more about Sound Branch and how it can help you with internal communication and enhancing the customer experience by Signing Up for a free personal account here:

https://soundbranch.com/

PS. Your very own voice messaging platform can be set up for your business, alongside branded audio sites on our business version of Sound Branch.

I hope you enjoyed reading.

The simple human fact is that we can talk three times faster than we can type. This fact coupled with the vastly improved accuracy of voice to text transcription means that new ways of interacting with IT are on the horizon. This big opportunity is happening now and we are at the start of an adoption curve whereby 50% of search will be conducted by voice by 2020.

This voice first approach to IT has consequences to how we design and manage our websites. Users who use voice search tend to have longer query strings. People using devices such as Amazon Echo with Alexa and Google Home with Google Assistant are typically asking lots of how and what questions.

If search queries are becoming more conversational content online will become more and more like having a conversation. Google has a new position in search engine rankings, the position zero, and websites and content providers who give the most relevant results will be rewarded with this position.

The rise of voice technology and how this will change search has many connotations. For example, if you are on an Amazon Echo device and you ask a question instead of getting a page of results you only get one answer. This poses challenges and opportunities for advertisers.

Whilst voice is very much a less frictionless user experience brands need to think about how they get their message and their name across. With some voice controlled devices such as the Amazon echo showing screen displays, this gives adequate opportunities for visual branding. However, when a voice search returns results simply with audio companies need to think about how they can differentiate themselves and become front of mind in this context.

Alongside making your content on your website more conversational companies can think about developing things such as Alexa skills and Google actions, which are apps for voice enabled technology.

There particular scenarios where voice technology wins and one of the big opportunities is the connected car. When your hands are tied up at the steering wheel the only option is to use your voice. Another trend is lots of kitchens up and down the country have Amazon echo devices or equivalents playing music, playing latest Flash briefings and telling us the weather. These trends offer big opportunities for conversational commerce.

A priority for all webmasters and web designers must be to make their website voice friendly. One way to do this is to give a greater priority to frequently asked questions on websites. Voice is on the rise so frequently asked questions give your website content which would be more likely to turn up in voice search results.

Now of course frequently asked questions can be typed up but there is a faster way of generating this content. The more frequently asked question content you have on your site the greater the likelihood of you turning up in search results relevant to your industry and your products and services.

Frequently asked question content can be curated in 10 second chunks using a tool such as Sound Branch. All audio which is recorded on Sound Branch is transcribed into text with 96% accuracy. These transcripts can then be embedded on your websites along with the associated audio. This means that your content can be returned in the form of the search query. So if a person types in a search term they will get the text results but alternatively if they search with their voice we can return audio to the end user for a delightful user experience.

In summary, voice search is not going away. We are in the early stages of the adoption curve and big tech companies such as Samsung (Bixby), Google (Google Assistant), Microsoft (Cortana), Amazon (Alexa) and Apple (Siri) are fighting to win the battle of the voice assistant. Siri was probably the first to market but has since fallen behind. In terms of market share, Amazons approach of putting voice enabled devices and Amazon Alexa technology into lots of hardware in our homes is giving them a competitive advantage. Google is still the dominant search engine for the web but its position is under threat from a tie-up between Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Bing. Who will win the battle remains to be seen. One thing is for certain and that is that search is becoming more natural. To maximise this opportunity our website content must be friendly to the human voice.

You can sign up to Sound Branch, the voice notes app, for free by following the link below. You can then experiment creating conversational content such as frequently asked questions. This content then can be embedded on your website to improve your search engine results, gain extra traffic and ultimately new customers.

https://soundbranch.com/

How many times have people been late to your meetings in the last month? If you are like me there are cases where punctuality isn’t always respected and quite often there is a good reason for this. It could be somebody misreading the diary or it could be the technology for an online meeting letting users down.

Who usually takes the meeting minutes? Our board meetings always have meeting minutes but quite often less formal meetings do not have audit trails on who said what and when. This lack of documentation can lead to a lack of clarity and accountability.

So what if you could eliminate meetings which did not start in time and you had meeting minutes every time? Well, this is now possible with Sound Branch Gatherings.

Below are the 5 simple steps to create and conduct a just-in-time meeting:

Step 1 – All meeting participants register for a Sound Branch account

Step 2 – Your meeting organiser adds all participants to a private group

Step 3 – A gathering link is sent out as a meeting invite and is added to all participants calendars

Step 4 – And here is the magic – on the date and time of meeting people click the URL to join from their calendar

The advantage of just-in-time meetings is that busy executives can drop in and out whilst listening to all the conversations at a time of their pleasing. In addition, people late to a meeting can catch up by playing the audio that preceded them. This saves the need to repeat back to people what has been going on.

Furthermore, as the meeting overruns some people can drop out and others can stay online if needed. Just-in-time meetings give greater flexibility of diary management.

Once in the gathering all participants using their mobile phone or just a computer microphone record voice messages (voice notes) with their points of view. This works similar to group chat in messaging applications.

Step 5 – Once the Gathering has been completed the chair of the meeting can review the transcript of meeting minutes, make amendments and then circulate.

So, in summary, a Sound Branch Gathering:

• Reduces meeting cancellations and scheduling administration
• Increases meeting participation
• Gives people more time to prepare answers

All this leads to better meeting experiences and higher levels of engagement. From a business continuity, governance and compliance standpoint having meeting minutes available just-in-time is also a tick in the box for boards of directors.

Finally, it is worth noting that face-to-face meetings and live online video meetings have their clear benefits. For run-of-the-mill meetings and certainly meetings held across time zones the just-in-time meeting approach allows people a better way of managing their time, gives everyone a voice and ensures people are kept in the loop.