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.

Case Study: Sean Gilligan Executive International Recruitment

Running an international company as an owner manager puts additional pressure on my time. If I’m not careful I can end up working not only European time zones but also American time zones. Clearly this is unsustainable and so smarter ways of working need to be sought.

In business process engineering, there are value added steps and steps which do not add any value. Trying to schedule telephone interviews is bad enough in the UK as you have to come to an amenable time, which is appropriate for both the candidate and for the recruiter. More often than not these telephone interviews happen early on a morning or later on during the evening after working hours. This is anti sociable for both the candidate and the recruiter especially if they have young families. If you add international time zones to this as a dimension scheduling telephone interviews becomes even more complex.

This is why I have approached telephone interviews in a different way. If you do away with the need for a set date and time you can create both a better customer experience for the candidate and greater flexibility to you as the hiring manager. Probably about 1 year ago I started using voice messages as a means to recruit talent.

Reading a CV can give clues and guidelines as to whether a candidate is a good fit for your business in terms of their skills and experience. Turning that CV into an audio profile gives you further insights to a person’s proficiency in oral communication. Of course, your audio can be played back and shared with other managers within your organisation which means you don’t have to repeat yourself on a person’s credentials.

Below are five simple steps on how I use voice messaging and audio profiles to filter through my talent pipelines. By using such a technique you can speed up your time to hire and Sound Branch will improve the quality of hires within your organisation.

Step 1 – Thank the candidate for applying and ask them to download the Sound Branch app and to send you a voice note by searching for your name.

Step 2 – You receive notifications via the Sound Branch app from prospective candidates.

Step 3 – You listen to the voice messages and elevator pitches and the best candidates are invited to create an audio profile.

Step 4 – You listen to the audio profile and the best candidates are shared with other managers involved in the hiring decision making process.

Step 5 – Once all hiring managers have fed back their thoughts you can then schedule either a Skype interview or indeed a face to face interview.

So why does this approach work? Firstly, voice messaging makes interviews time independent rather than dependent. Furthermore, the recruitment process instead of being a quick telephone interview is spread out over a number of days or perhaps even weeks giving more time to both the candidate and the recruiter. This means you can look at how quickly people get back to you, and their tone and inflection can be measured. All of this can be played back so no details go missing. Afterall bad hiring can cost a business more than not hiring at all! By eliminating the telephone interview this is a more productive way to filter your talent pipeline whilst keeping a work life balance in check.

With the rise of the gig economy and more knowledge workers based at home how do you maximise team productivity and connectivity?

Formal online meetings have their place and are necessary for various cadence within your business. However, more often than not these meetings interrupt the flow of work being delivered for your customers.

With the rise of voice technology including smart speakers, connected cars and mobile phones more businesses are adopting bring your own device policies within the workplace.

Sound Branch is a new platform which enables you to connect to your workforce using the power of the voice. Legacy systems including ERP, CRM are complimented by this voice technology. Sound Branch acts as the glue keeping your remote workers engaged and informed.

The Sound Branch business console allows you to add, edit and delete users, create groups, change settings and gives you business insights with conversational analytics. You can also search all the conversations going on in your business.

All good business leaders know that you must get your people talking. Sound Branch using modern technology enables this  and saves time and money in the process.

Using Sound Branch we believe you can reduce your email consumption by up to 40% and reduce meetings by up to 50%. We’ve all been there when an online meeting or conference call does not start on time. These situations can be mitigated entirely. Sound Branch allows you to have just in time meetings and all the meeting minutes are automatically transcribed for approval and distribution as soon as the meeting closes.

Your business branding and corporate look and feel can be applied to Sound Branch to make it seamlessly integrate with your intranets, G Suite, Office 365 and salesforce.com platforms. This gives users a seamless experience to your audio messaging forums.

We can all speak faster than we can type. The voice gives you a motion and therefore allows you to really understand how your teams are feeling. Understanding all of this means you can drive performance, engagement, happiness and therefore productivity.

Finally, as all businesses are people businesses you can use Sound branch as a candidate management system. External candidates are asked to create a Sound Branch account and then to create an audio profile. You can then play each candidates’ skills education and experience instead of doing a traditional telephone interview.  Again this means you can save lots of time by avoiding telephone interviews. Between interviews candidates can be kept warm and feedback can be given to unsuccessful applicants. Candidates can also give you references through audio testimonials.

In the fight for talent Sound Branch allows you a new way to acquire talent and keep your talent. This point of difference will give you a competitive advantage in your marketplace.

So what’s stopping you get started today with Sound Branch voice notes today and accelerate your business with the speed of sound.

Create a Sound Branch Business Account

Today we’re launching Sound Branch, featuring a new mobile app built for effortless podcast creation (free for Apple iPhone and Android Phones), a brand new website soundbranch.com with creation tools and audio inbox, and unlimited podcast hosting that’s 100% free. It’s the easiest way to get started podcasting.

Podcast are now in the mass market but like radio podcasts are difficult for people to create. Sound Branch makes podcast creation easy letting you focus on your creativity. Current podcasting tools are expensive, difficult to use and confusing. Sound Branch simplifies podcasting and makes it social. Podcasts can be created for the public or can be created privately in groups.

So we built Sound Branch as a social audio platform for voice.

Sound Branch removes all of the difficulty of getting podcasts made and shared.

With a new mobile app, web tools, and 100% free podcast hosting for everybody, Sound Branch is the place to create podcasts you’re a professional or a beginner getting started out.

A new mobile app made for podcasting

Sound Branch’s free app for Apple iOS and Android designed for making a podcast, right from your phone. The moment you open up the app you are taken to the timeline where you can create seeds which are 10 second audio clips from which you other users can branch. Audio can be public and searchable on the timeline or can be put into private groups where only people you invite can listen. All audio is transcribed to text making it searchable.

Users on Sound Branch can send each other private 1 to 1 voice messages and all users can create audio profiles with their skills, experience, education and background.

All seeds and branches can have images attached making your audio come to life. There is now a new feature for building audio slideshow which can be shared and is a cheaper way of creating engaging multimedia over video. This can then be shared on major social media networks as Twitter cards or on Facebook and other platforms.

Easy to use web tools for making podcasting simple

With Sound Branch, you can now make or manage your podcasts with ease. The web tools sync seamlessly with our app, making it easy to switch between your desktop browser and mobile app. Start recording on your desktop and finish off on your mobile if you like.

There’s a lot you can do with the new web tools, including:

• Access your private audio inbox to listen to all your new messages
• View conversational analytics that let you know what people are talking about on public posts, private groups or in chats
• Manage all of your audio from the web and see how many people have listened to your clips
• Create audio slideshows for presentations

Sound Branch gives every user their own audio profile on the web.

Get started now!

If you’ve ever wanted to make a podcast, there’s really never been a better time to get started. No more dealing with the hassle of buying expensive equipment, learning confusing software, paying for file hosting or any of the other annoying aspects of podcast creation and sharing.

Sign up for your Free Sound Branch Account

Lots of people live on their inbox aiming for zero inbox and frantically reply to emails as soon as they arrive.

There are quicker and more efficient types of communication which are faster than email.  With email you can’t see who is online and it’s easy to get lost in nested threads.

Millennials think their email is slow and passive. In fact many millennials don’t check their email and only use it for official communication with external customers. For internal communication they’d much rather use WeChat, WhatsApp and similar messaging applications.

For quick discussions around important issues chat applications are far superior to traditional email. More and more people are favouring chat and voice applications to reduce their dependency on email and to save time.

Some people are still heavily dependent on email.  People email important documents to themselves as a means of archiving.  So the question is not how we eliminate email but how do we reduce our time on it when other applications are simply faster, quicker and easier to use.

Our email obsession starts first thing in the morning. Over half of people on the planet feel relieved when they get to zero inbox. The trick is to take people off email by using more effective types of communication.  Internal communication is a good starting point to take people away from email and on to other platforms such as voice messaging.  It’s much quicker for people to talk and listen than it is to type and read.

With more and more people checking their email on mobile phones other applications such as Sound Branch voice notes offer serious alternatives for richer types of communication.

You can sign up for a free Sound Branch account using the link below:

https://www.soundbranch.com/sign-up

You can access voice messaging via a web browser at soundbranch.com and mobile apps are available on Google Play and the Apple App Store.