What’s the first voice your callers hear? Interactive Voice Response (IVR) – also known as auto attendant messaging – is a popular feature with busy businesses operating a number of departments. The IVR technology quickly connects calls, offering a number of pre-recorded options for the caller to choose from. It then recognises keypad or voice instructions to direct calls to desired departments efficiently with minimum disruption to callers and staff. But that’s not the only benefit… 
Finding the right song for that great weather just got a little easier. We’ve recently stumbled across Musicovery.com, a clever site that allows you to find and listen to music based on its era, genre and tempo — and most importantly, your mood.
Companies spend a lot on symbols. On symbols that people associate with their name.
It’s kind of reductive, but in the simplest terms, advertising is about making an effective symbol that carries a full brand message. That’s why the Nike ‘Swoosh’ logo equals athletics. Equals running. Equals gold medals. Equals you running faster.
Advertising is about making a large concept into a picture. Reducing sentences and paragraphs into lines and squiggles.
It’s been about that for hundreds of years. About graphic identities carrying brands.
Now, of course, we’re producing much more than logos. We’ve got the internet, for one – we’ve got the viral videos and the microsites; the discussions across social media and becoming a company’s fan on Facebook. Now, businesses are creating fully branded ‘user experiences’.
But in the last century, we also got ways to produce better sounds, and faster. We have studios and microphones. And as this medium has grown and gone digital, so too have the agencies (we’re one!) who specialise almost exclusively in audio branding – not graphic-based branding. And on commercial radio, telly, the internet, businesses are using these agencies to compete for the most memorable sound.
Mark Griffiths, one of PH Audio’s dedicated Sound Producers, offers his take on a small but critical element of voiceover editing.
My job is to take people’s breath away.
I edit voiceovers for a living. One of the main tasks is to remove all the breathing sounds.
Voiceover artists’ voices get compressed in the final mix. This has the effect of making all the quiet parts of speech louder. It’s one of the studio techniques that gives that extra oomph to the voices of radio announcers and pop singers.
But if you compress a voice track with the breaths left in, the breaths are amplified. These noises, which are normally so quiet we don’t notice them in normal speech, are boosted to the same volume as the words.
It makes the speaker sound like the Elephant Man.
So I get rid of them.
It’s 2010, which means it’s officially The Future. We’re all using jetpacks to get to work, using teleporters to go on city breaks, talking to family with our watches, that kind of thing.
Well, sort of. Google and Apple taking over the world besides, we’re not quite as advanced as our forefathers imagined. It’s easy to laugh at old science fiction stories, movies and games now we’re here, but some of them really did think we’d be in flying cars by now. Even Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most nerdy celebrated science fiction writers in the world, thought we’d be playing with gas monsters on Jupiter by next year.
So, in the spirit of predicting the future (and because it’s trendy to talk about the next decade), we thought we’d gather ideas about the way On-Hold Marketing might change and develop. Click ‘read more’ to see what we came up with.
So far 2010 doesn’t seem very welcoming, does it? You don’t need us to tell you that Britain is facing one of the worst winters in 100 years. Schools are closed, roads are shut and transport is disrupted – you might even be one of the three million workers who have been unable to make it into work. But how can businesses prepare?
In the same way we now watch Blu-ray over Betamax, and listen to MP3s instead of cassettes, the technology for on-hold messaging has advanced greatly in the last ten years.
At PH Audio we’ve used a number of methods to deliver music on hold, and our use of audio technology is something we’re always looking to improve and develop. So, from CD players that jumped and warped, to digital playback with a lot of flexibility, in this post you’ll find our own rough audio technology timeline.
That’s what Google asked themselves and Google Wave is their answer. Their point is that email has been around for forty years, and even though it’s still the primary form of electronic communication today, it’s certainly not the only one. So, they set about creating a way to merge the best of email, social networking and instant messaging to create a super communication tool, namely Wave.
Wave is still a prototype. It’s currently available by invitation only so its usage is limited to a lucky few until all the bugs have been ironed out. Google Wave is perhaps most well known for being at best baffling, and at worst, completely unfathomable. We’re not one of the lucky Wave account holders at PH Audio Blog, but we’re taking on the challenge of demystifying the Wave using that fine resource – t’internet.
Last week, Google and PRS reached an agreement to lift the block on the music videos, sealing the music rights deal. It is expected that all the removed videos will be uploaded by users back onto the site in the next few days.