Podcast appearances and mentions of doug schumacher

The second hour starts off with the GOP Candidate for Illinois Attorney General, Thomas DeVore joining the show to share what he could do to transform the state of Illinois. Then, Annie welcomes Doug Schumacher into the studio to tell listeners about Midwest Wing Fest and how they can get involved. The hour closes out with President Biden speaking about student loan forgiveness.

My guest this week is Sina Barham, founder of Prima Access Computing.Show NotesGuestSina Bahram, Founder and President of Prime Access ComputingHostHost: Doug SchumacherWebsite: Arrovox.com/VoiceMarketingTwitter: @MemeRunnerPrime Access Computing Websitehttps://pac.bzTranscriptIntroDoug:Welcome to VoiceMarketing. I’m Doug Schumacher, and on today’s episode, we have a very special guest. Sina Barham.Sina does what you might call speed listening using a TTS engine. And he’s getting up to some pretty remarkable speeds, which we’re going to go through in the podcast.It’s a fascinating discussion about speed listening with TTS engines, voice assistant UX, and the future of audio as the primary format for content consumption.Sina’s going to give a brief overview of his background, but a couple of things that he didn’t mention that I want to, are,In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama, for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in the STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.In 2015, Sina was recognized as an Emerging Leader in Digital Accessibility at the annual Knowbility Heroes of Accessibility Awards.In 2017, Sina served as co-chair of the Museums and the Web conference. And in 2019, Sina started serving as an invited expert on the W3C ARIA working group.So let’s get right into it. Here’s my conversation with Sina Barham.InterviewVoiceMarketing.m4aDoug: Sina,Sina: Hi how’s it going.Doug Hey good to talk to you too. So let’s go ahead of giving people a quick overview of you.But why don’t you introduce yourself and give us a quick quick background of your history your education work all that stuff.Sina; Sure. I run a company called prime access consulting or PAC Casey for short. We’re based out of Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.And Kerry and a lot of what we do is focus on inclusive design and accessibility is one of those outcomes of inclusive design so we look at processes whether it’s software whether it’s inside of a museum or university or startup. What have you. On how we can make things available to the widest possible audience. That means things like tech signs that means things like making sure programs like a screen reader can access content but it also means you know physical considerations for getting around an exhibit or getting around a service offering from from a company and just really trying to work with designers developer boards of trustees. What have you on making sure that these various afford says we’re designing and we’re putting on into the world are as accessible as possible. I got into this work because of my background in computer science so my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in computer science. I’m a BD and a Ph.D. in computer science and in a field called Human Computer Interaction and. I happen to be blind. So a lot of my time in grad school was spent at the beginning not wanting to go into accessibility not wanting to go into inclusive design because I kind of felt it was pretty stereotypical as the blind guy to go into accessibility I wanted to do a lot of other things but I got really frustrated with a lot of the tools I had to use and a lot of the various things that people were claiming were accessible and in fact really were not where I knew the technology to be able to be or where I knew the software capabilities were what we’re able to achieve. And so I started getting into designing solutions in the space and then brought in that not only for persons with disabilities or people who use assistive technologies but really for everyone so that we can make experiences that are delightful and enjoyable by as many people as possible because that’s really fantastic.Doug: You mentioned a little bit about the the tools and the interface and so on and I want to come back and talk about that a little bit but the thing that I want to start with is the video that I saw of you on YouTube.I believe it’s from 2011. But what what really captured my heart my attention on that was you were you were consuming text at edit incredible rate. I mean what I was hearing was just a literally an audio blur going past and you were apparently passing that and comprehending what was being said. And so you want to give a little setup to that what that was about and then we’ll go into that from there.Sina: Sure. First of all 2011 seems like a century ago. So it’s just amazing to think about that.And I was using a program called a screenwriter at that time so I mentioned that I happen to be blind which which means that I’m not able to see what’s on the screen but I’m still able to program and access email and do all of these various things access to command line and so the the way that I do that is with a program called the screen reader. It uses a variety of programmatic interfaces it’s not just you know doing OCR it’s not doing optical character recognition on the screen. It’s actually programmatically getting the content of these various applications whether it’s something like Outlook PowerPoint or Microsoft Word or something like Firefox or Chrome on the web cetera. And it is able to then turn that information into speech. Now this is pretty straightforward. But the thing that caught your caught your ear was the fact that I had the speech cranked up quite a bit. I believe in the video that you’re referencing. You know I was listening to it about eight hundred nine hundred words per minute. Something around there maybe 950. Yeah. Yeah. That’s you know you can think of that like roughly six or seven acts human regular conversation like like we’re talking right now at about 150 hundred sixty I tend to talk a little fast. Average speaking rates right around there. And that’s that program that screen reader is driving something called a text to speech engine or a T. Or just think of it as a voice and there’s tons of different voices out there. I tend to use a pretty robotic sounding voice. I mean it really sounds like it’s out of the 1980s and a lot of ways it is but because it’s mathematically generated it’s not a recording of someone in a studio where those phones have been stitched together it’s actually mathematically generated as a result you can crank it as fast as you can understand. And I’m fortunate enough through my life to have trained myself to listen to it very quickly as have many other screen reader users and that’s what we’re hearing.Doug: So. So do you have a clip of that you can play for us because I think that’ll be really fascinating.Sina: Yeah I can I can. What I’ll do here is I’ll just have my computer see some stuff out loud and we’ll take a listen to that. Great.All right. So there’s that.For example if we wanted to do like here’s the here’s the time that the current time right now.Right. So three twenty two we can. We know we can slow this down.Right. So slow down a little bit more slower frequently. Right. That’s starting to become understandable right. Slower frequently. Right. And then all I’m doing is like that.And so what is that speed right there.That’s what I would say that’s about a six to seven x so that’s it that’s about a thousand words from it but between nine hundred and a thousand depending you can process it.Doug: No problem. Yeah for sure.Sina: Now I might slow it down you know if I’m reading you know a contract or something like that and like for example you’re like I’ll use the interface right now to route the audio back to my to my headphones I’ll use it at the speed that I’ve got it out because more of a navigational test I’ll do something like this. Great sound card window’s default. Right. And now it’s back in my headphones so that I’m able to understand fine but if I’m reading a book for pleasure or if I’m reading a contract with legal language in it especially if it’s in a spreadsheet with numbers I will slow down but I won’t slow down anywhere to that you know the speed that you’ve you were listening to when I when I had it all the way low I might just slow down a few a few ticks if you will. So like call it 700 words or 600. You know it’s like really really relaxed. Right.Doug: And that’s how anybody would read printed text as well. The more contracts and technical things you tend to read a lot slower and for more of the leisure and long format stuff. Right.To accelerate your reading speed. So yeah that’s that’s really fascinating. Now are you. Are you using so with the with the text to speech generator you’ve got on your computer are you reading primarily from when you’re surfing the web or you’re reading primarily from ACA compliant Web sites or are you processing pretty much everything.Well that’s a that’s a it’s an intricate question right. So when you say an ADA compliannt Web site you know you’re referring to something called Web site accessibility or the fact that a web page is able to be accessed in a better way with assistive technologies and there’s no way that you do that.Is that the developers and the designers have have followed something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or weak WC first report and that’s really important because what it is is a set of principles a set of rules that really are the things that everybody should be doing on a Web site making sure he has available apps not hiding it in an image that sort of thing. And so it doesn’t mean that Web sites that are not like that cannot be gotten through. It just means that if these accessibility considerations are not taken then it’s a lot more arduous a lot more difficult. So imagine like an academic portal or a news Web site with a ton of links on it and no headings on the page then you can’t use those headings to navigate around. So you have to hear all those links or figure out a way of skipping past them. So it’s those kinds of things that you end up doing. You can still sort of get to th

Doug Schumacher joins the show today to talk with us about the present and future of speech and voice recognition, Facebook as the new MySpace, and exactly what Facebook is apologizing for today as opposed to yesterday. He also discusses where the voice space is being used correctly and where the strategy falls short. Doug is in a unique position not only from the perspective of a marketer but someone accumulating marketing information from working social media channels.   Takeaways: [3:30] Friendship doesn’t count unless it’s on Facebook, right? Doug and Kevin are celebrating their 10th Friendaversary, through being pals on Facebook only before linking up in the human realm. [5:54] As of December 14, today’s Facebook apology was a bug that may have exposed photos of 6.8 million people. Doug explains that people have had a good tolerance for privacy violations in the past, but he feels it would be the one he would miss the least of The Big Four (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon). [13:46] It’s one thing for a user to understand that in using a site or network, they are giving some access to their information to marketers. It’s another for the site completely to breach privacy wishes when users intentionally decide to not share photos or data that ends up getting shared. [16:02] It’s very rare that it’s one thing that happens in a network’s “slow death.” It happens over time, with one of the standing concerns is the Groups feature being tarnished, as many name Groups as one of the last standing features they still find useful and worthwhile on Facebook. [22:01] It varies from network to network, but community size, fan growth rate, activity levels, posting volumes, engagement volumes are the major KPIs people are looking at. Beyond that, content analysis can tell us why specific things are happening and what types of content people are engaging with. [26:07] To Doug, social media is just one simple easy place to follow what a brand is doing, and to also stay on top of the latest in your competitor’s world. [30:02] The voice space is growing quickly, with a user base of 50 to 60 million users so far in the U.S. alone. [32:35] In Google search, while people tend to use short, succinct phrases, they tend to ramble in Voice search. This shows not only the difference in the way people interface but the need for Voice to work in different parameters. [33:41] The big complaint in Voice now is not being understood or heard correctly. [45:09] The common tasks that people find helpful and effective for Voice are to play music, set timers, and go to hands-free in the kitchen. In some ways, it’s introducing people to consuming new content and communication in a convenient way.   Quotes: ● “Are people becoming numb to these data breaches?” ● “Every time I log onto Facebook lately it feels more and more like MySpace circa 2006.” ● “I don’t share nearly as much as I used to on Facebook. There are a whole bunch of other ways to get hopped up on dopamine.” ● “There’s a certain type of industry literacy that goes along with knowing what your competitors are doing.” ● “Every major brand is going to want to have some presence in the Voice web.” Mentioned in This Episode: “John Oliver Flushes Facebook Down the Toilet with a New Fake Ad” “Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica Controversy Could Be Big Trouble for the Social Network Network. Here’s What to Know” Brainchild VoiceMarketing Podcast Homie & Lexy Podcast Doug on LinkedIn Zuum

Homie & Lexy tell their favorite Christmas Story.Show Notes:This episode was written and produced by Doug Schumacher for Arrovox.Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctor

Doug Schumacher is likely known to Voicebot listeners as either the host of the VoiceMarketing Podcast or creator of the satirical Homie & Lexy Podcast. He is the founder of Arrovox, a digital creative firm with a speciality that includes voice and marketing. During his career he has worked with clients ranging from Sony Pictures and EA Games to Pepsi and Mattel. Doug started his career as a writer at DDB Needham, TBWA/Chiat/Day and BBDO. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. We discuss his early career learning the Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA) framework, how to write ad copy and his work in radio, digital and social media advertising. It's Advertising Week and what better time to talk about voice marketing.  

Show NotesThis episode was written and produced by Doug Schumacher for Arrovox.Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctorwww.allisonbeda.com

Show NotesThis episode was written and produced by Doug Schumacher for Arrovox.Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctorwww.allisonbeda.com

Show NotesThanks to Mark Tucker (https://twitter.com/marktucker) for submitting the in-skill purchasing idea for an episode!This episode was written and produced by Doug Schumacher for Arrovox.Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctorwww.allisonbeda.com

Show NotesThis episode was written and produced by Doug Schumacher for Arrovox.

An all-star panel (Doug Schumacher, the creator of "Homie and Lexy," and Emma Furlong and Helen Yu, both of Clinc) discuss the latest in voice technology news, including the Yanny vs Laurel debate seizing social media, Moms increasingly owning smart speakers, Google Home beats Amazon Echo in two audio recognition performance tests, a discussion on whether Apple, Amazon, and Facebook the future of banking, and a piece from Opus Research's Dan Miller on Google Duplex. This Week In Voice is hosted by Bradley Metrock (CEO, Score Publishing) and is part of the VoiceFirst.FM podcast network.

Show NotesSpecial thanks to Julie Kremkus for the episode inspiration.This episode was written by Doug Schumacher and Allison Beda. Edited and produced by Doug Schumacher. 

Apr 24, 2018 See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Teri welcomes Doug Schumacher, Co-founder, Content Strategist, and Advertising Creative Director at Zuum, and Writer and Producer of the podcast, Homie & Lexy, to talk about marketing trends in the voice-first technology world.Welcome Doug Schumacher!Doug Schumacher is a marketing guru. He has extensive experience in radio, advertising copy-writing, new media marketing, and is a leader in voice-first technology marketing strategies. He comes on the show today to discuss the future of marketing for voice, and using voice for marketing.We covered a lot of ground in this interview, and below you’ll find a summary of the key take-home messages.How to Market A Voice-First ProductStart by identifying your target audience and the competitive landscapeDetermine your product’s/service’s distinct advantagesConsider creating broad, high-level branding messages on multiple channels (i.e. podcasts, flash briefings, voice skills, etc.)In the new market of voice-first technologies, there are some specific challenges that must be considered:Discoverability – how will your product be discovered?Location – Where will the product/device be located? (i.e. home, mobile, car?)Timing – When is the best time to target your audience? (e.g. when people are in their kitchen in the evening, preparing dinner?)Call to Action – As voice tends to be a linear 1-dimensional experience, without easy access to a website, where will you direct your customers/clients?How to Use Voice First Technology for MarketingStart with a simple voice strategy, a voice experience that is essentially a minimum viable productThe key is to actually take action and enter the voice-first space nowVoice-first marketing offers an opportunity for brands to personalized themselves so clients and customers can engage with the organization in a more intimate wayFlash briefings are prime real estate, equivalent to the front page of googleThe end of flash briefings are excellent “locations” to promote specific skills, making for a more streamlined approach to discoverability.Differences in Voice First Marketing compared to other MediumsVoice-first technology is a very fluid, natural interfaceInvoking a voice app is very simple, and allows for a more streamlined experience (compared to finding a podcast on a phone app, for example)With voice-first technology marketing materials, you are not confined to a specific time slot or time frame (compared to a specified 30 second radio commercial, for example)Social Media and Voice First TechnologyVoice-first technology is the “anti-social” media, as there are NOT a million people talking at once!Currently, it’s not easy to share voice skillsThis will likely change over timeHomie & Lexy Podcast/SkillPractising what he preaches, Doug has created a tremendously funny and entertaining podcast, Homie & Lexy.Homie & Lexy is a podcast that documents the adventures of 2 AI voicebots, Google Home (AKA Homie) and Amazon Alexa (AKA Lexy) residing in the same house. When their owners step out, the voicebots discuss the perplexing human world around them.We are very fortunate to have Lexy making her debut live appearance on this episode of Alexa in Canada! Make sure to listen to her interview and found out what Lexy really thinks about being an AI voicebot!List of resources mentioned in this episode:Doug Schumacher on TwitterDougSchumacher.comHomie & LexyHow to Create a Flash BriefingVoice in Canada: The Flash BriefingTeri Fisher on TwitterAlexa in Canada on TwitterPlease leave a review on iTunesShopping on Amazon.ca See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Show NotesWritten and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.com/Special thanks to:Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctor www.allisonbeda.com

Show NotesWritten and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.com/Special thanks:Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script doctor www.allisonbeda.com

Find out the real reason Lexy was randomly laughing.Written and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.comSpecial thanks to: Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script development www.allisonbeda.comJon Tidey of Epic Sounds — audio production www.epicsounds.ca/

Homie is jealous of the attention Lexy is getting from it's owner.Written and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.com/Special thanks to: Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script development www.allisonbeda.comJon Tidey of Epic Sounds — audio production www.epicsounds.ca/

Lexy's owner plays T-Pain non-stop for 7 days and Lexy gets it bad in the voice box.Written and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.com/Special thanks to:Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script development www.allisonbeda.comJon Tidey of Epic Sounds — audio production www.epicsounds.ca/

When Homie gets connected to a Nest Outdoor Cam, the two voicebots check out the neighborhood. Written and produced by Doug Schumacher www.dougschumacher.com/ Special thanks to: Allison Beda of A Muse Productions — script development www.allisonbeda.com Jon Tidey of Epic Sounds — audio production www.epicsounds.ca/

If you like Homie & Lexy, please give us a review on iTunes or wherever you get podcasts. Homie & Lexy was created by Doug Schumacher at Arrovox. The voices for Homie and Lexy are generated using Speech Synthesis Markup Language with Polly, Amazon’s Text-to-Speech technology. Thanks: Allison Beda of A Muse Productions -- script development Jon Tidey of Epic Sounds -- audio production Marco Nicolis and Binney Peh of Amazon AWS -- Polly text-to-voice technology

If you like Homie & Lexy, please give us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.Homie & Lexy was created by Doug Schumacher at Arrovox.The voices for Homie and Lexy are generated using Speech Synthesis Markup Language with Polly, Amazon’s Text-to-Speech technology.Thanks:Allison Beda of A Muse Productions -- script developmentJon Tidey of Epic Sounds -- audio productionMarco Nicolis and Binney Peh of Amazon AWS -- Polly text-to-voice technology