Jodi Krangle

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Summurai

Listening On The Go

March 17, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

How are you listening to this podcast right now? Maybe you’re sitting at your computer or hearing it on a smart speaker, which probably means that you’re listening with one app while keeping busy with a few other things. You might also be using a tablet or an MP3 player, which lets you stay on the move while you’re hearing the show. But what’s really become popular over the past few years is listening on your phone. Just this past month, almost 24 million podcast listeners used their smartphones, compared to 17 million for everything else put together. One thing all these choices have in common is that they let you keep busy while you’re listening. And in today’s fast-paced world, digital audio, particularly podcasts and audiobooks, is becoming a cornerstone of our daily lives.

Multitasking isn’t always a good thing. We might feel like we’re being more productive when we multitask, but over the years studies have shown that we really do better when we’re focusing on just one task at a time. If you’re curious to find out just how well you multitask, here’s a link to a short test:

At the same time, audio does have some advantages of its own. Our brains are finely tuned to listening to each other, to hearing a speaker’s tone and pace, their inflections and the mood they’re expressing beneath their words. Reading is still a pretty new trick when it comes to our brains, which means written words might not connect as quickly or deeply as hearing them spoken aloud. And while reading lets us consider the words more carefully and go back over them more easily, digital audio leaves us free to keep working, to go running or driving, to live our lives while we’re listening.

Just recently I had Summurai founder Tal Florentin on the show, and his company is at the forefront of this digital audio revolution. Summurai is a content management service that takes written articles and condenses them into short audio snippets for people on the go. Here’s a link to a video with more information:

Even so, digital audio doesn’t leave much room for distraction. If you’re listening to a podcast on your way to work, that means you’re probably not listening to anything else right at that moment. This can make audio branding and advertising much more effective than other forms of online marketing; nearly 70% of podcast listeners report that podcast ads made them aware of new products and services. And that audience is quickly growing in the US: more than a hundred million Americans now listen to at least one podcast a month.

Audiobooks are also becoming more popular, with one in five Americans having listened to one within the past year. While the first vinyl book recordings were made in 1932, and the first books on tape released in 1975, the industry’s grown in ways that could hardly have been imagined back then. George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, for instance, has been adapted into an audiobook with a cast of 166 Hollywood actors, and last year an Audible adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman featured its own all-star cast. Audio dramas have also experienced a revival over the past few years, with authors penning exclusive works meant to be heard instead of read.

While the freedom to listen and multitask all at once might be a selling point for audio content, sound can create a more powerful connection than just one of convenience. The act of learning something new triggers the reward center in our brains, much the same way as eating our favorite food or winning a game. And storytelling isn’t just part of our history, it’s how most of us learned to read: we grew up listening to our parents and teachers read to us. Audio content can combine both these things together, teaching us new things in a way that connects with our deepest experiences.

Printed books and traditional radio certainly aren’t going away anytime soon, but digital audio has become the fastest growing sector in the publishing industry. Twenty million people started to listen to podcasts for the first time last year, and that number’s only going to keep growing. And as more and more people find themselves listening on the go, the opportunities to reach out to and engage with that emerging audience will keep growing with it.

Would you consider giving this podcast an honest review? You can do that here: https://lovethepodcast.com/audiobranding.  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

Filed Under: Audio Branding Tagged With: audio books, audio drama, digital audio, human voice, multitasking, podcasts, productivity, public speaking, smartphones, storytelling, Summurai, Tal Florentin

Interview with Tal Florentin, Founder & CEO of Summurai – Part 2

March 10, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

This is the 2nd part of my interview with Tal Florentin. In the first part of our interview, we discussed the background of Summurai and where businesses are starting to use more audio. In this second part, we switch our conversation to talk about other places where audio is being used so content can be relayed to its intended audience.

We discuss:

  • Audio being used to give instructions for things like pre-surgery
  • Using different audio for male versus female consumers
  • The struggle that comes up when working with businesses to use a less formal tone of voice
  • Asking what kind of shoes the company wants the voice actor to wear when speaking their script in order to determine the scale of casual to formal in their audio
  • It can be tricky to find the right voice to match the tone of the content
  • The need for their own unique platform to house the audio
  • When having both the written and audio versions of content makes the most sense
  • The first use of audio to relay content- the guided tour
  • The summarization of content and how it comes into play
  • The struggle of long audio versions of content (like an audiobook)
  • The benefits of microlearning
  • Using microlearning as a way to summarize content for someone the same way a friend might be able to if you were in person
  • Summaries of people’s expertise and how that helps
  • Using summies to help with the medical field for doctors to learn
  • Using summies to help the layman learn about concepts that are hard to understand if you’re not in that field
  • How hard it is to be natural on video, which makes it hard to connect with your audience
  • The similarity from video to audio and how hard it is to sound natural when doing voice acting
  • We connect better when we feel like we’re part of a conversation
  • Voice actors who have done in person acting sometimes struggle and will overdo it
  • Personal voice versus professional voice
  • Opting in to using the voice memo app because it sounds more natural
  • Natural communication sounds like people just saying what they need to say
  • More info on Summurai

If you want to find out more info about Tal or Summurai, visit:

Website: www.summurai.com 

Downloadable PDF: www.summurai.com/ebook

Audio version of the PDF: http://summur.ai/dTEDG

This episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco (http://www.humbertofranco.com/).

Would you consider reviewing the Audio Branding Podcast?  If so, here’s the Apple Podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/audio-branding/id1489042453  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

Filed Under: Audio Branding Tagged With: audio content, audio instructions, conversational audio, female audio, male audio, microlearning, right voice, summarize, summary, Summurai, video to audio

Interview with Tal Florentin, Founder & CEO of Summurai – Part 1

March 3, 2021 by Jodi Krangle

In this interview, I have the pleasure of speaking with Tal Florentin. He’s in the UX space and has spent the last decade working to enhance UX using audio in the Israeli market. He’s done some monumental things in the UX world, including creating the Israeli UX certification program. After realizing that audio is the future and bound to be bigger than video, he founded Summurai which allows companies to create audio branded channels for a variety of different reasons. You’ll find some great information about how to elevate your business with audio in this interview!

We discuss:

  • What life looks like for Tal in Israel with COVID
  • Our hopeful look at the future without COVID
  • Tal’s background in software engineering which led him to design
  • The big things that popped up for Tal when he was working in design and doing research
  • The mass amount of content that is now available and how to even start consuming it all
  • Tal’s lean toward audio to enhance and make for a better customer experience
  • Optimizing our time and what we’re doing each activity
  • Using audio to fill badly used time
  • The difference between where video is going from here and where audio is going
  • Working with companies to figure out how they want to use audio
  • The uncharted territory of audio
  • When first starting Summurai, trying to eliminate the human element
  • Creating shorter pieces of audio- under 3 minutes
  • Where the name Summurai came from
  • Tal’s process for creating audio
  • Some of the different things they’ve tried in Summurai
  • Trying to make things sound conversational and when that’s not actually the goal
  • Taking written content and creating audio content from that
  • Tal’s experience working with LG and creating audio versions of training kits
  • Pulling in story telling to the different audio pieces
  • Moving ourselves away from technology with audio
  • The benefits to moving away from technology

If you want to find out more about Tal or Summurai, you can visit:

Website: www.summurai.com 

Downloadable PDF: www.summurai.com/ebook

Audio version of the PDF: http://summur.ai/dTEDG

This episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco (http://www.humbertofranco.com/).

Would you consider reviewing the Audio Branding Podcast?  If so, here’s the Apple Podcast link: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/audio-branding/id1489042453  And if you like what you hear (and read!) – please do share it with anyone you think might be interested. Thanks so much!

And if you’re interested in crafting an audio brand for your business, why not check out my FREE download – 5 Tips For Implementing An Intentional Audio Strategy at https://voiceoversandvocals.com/audio-branding-strategy/

Filed Under: Audio Branding Tagged With: audio content, audio design, company identity, COVID, creating audio, LG, Summurai, technology, video versus audio, writing versus audio

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