Voice and audio seem to be at the cusp of another boom.
The premise makes sense: you can do other things while listening to audio. That gives you more time and we all value time possibly more than anything else in our lives.
But one thing with audio that has me questioning things is the voice memo feature on most smartphones.
On the iPhone the voice memo is integrated into apps like text messaging. Yet I don’t really see people using it. We send each other video messages via SnapChat, but for some reason we don’t send voice memos.
So I’ve been testing it in a few ways to see if using them really is helpful, easy to do and time saving.
Here are some of the ways I’ve found it useful.
1. Texting
I guess it’s not really texting, but this was the first way I thought of using voice memos and it works pretty good. Basically instead of sending a text you record a message and text it to the other person. They can listen when they want and they can do something else because they don’t need to look at the words and read. And they can listen as many times as they want. It’s like skipping the call and getting right to the voicemail.
2. Business Call Replacements
I’ve been testing this one out and it’s been working. We get inquiries at Ghost Blog Writers. The email process works just fine in most cases, but in some cases the person is busy and wants a call instead of reading the website or reading the email, which I get.
On most of those calls, though, I say the same things and answer the same questions. So I recorded a voice memo and now we email that over to the clients that ask for calls. We still provide a link to setup a call, but we’re finding that some are fine listening to the voice memo. No call needed. Time saved.
3. Website FAQs
This is an interesting one to me. It’s kind of pre-call; what I discussed in the previous point. People are busy. They don’t always have time to read entire websites to get the answers they want. Especially FAQs. So why not record those FAQs and add the voice memo to the website. Now people can listen while they’re doing something else.
4. Website Regular Content
Same as the one before but with all the content on your site. Just read it all and record it and add the memo to your site. Now people don’t have to read. More businesses are doing this with video, which is great, but why not do the same thing with audio?
5. Blog Posts
This one intrigues me. I’m thinking that when I finish writing a post I then read and record it and post the memo at the beginning of the post so people can either read or listen to it. Almost like a podcast.
6. Sales Calls
I’ve seen services that do cold calling, but instead of the call they just send a voice recording straight to the person’s inbox. That seems less intrusive. Maybe still intrusive, but less intrusive. It could replace emails. Just send a quick recording. You can add more context by the inflection of your voice also.
7. Notes
I know that songwriters do this. Sometimes they’ll have a title idea come to them and they’ll type it into their Notes app, but a lot of the time they get a melody idea and they’ll record a voice memo as a note so they can come back to it later and write the song.
No reason we can’t do that for all types of notes for business and for regular life.
8. Group Recordings
Say you’re in a business meeting brainstorming or talking about all kinds of things. Instead of having someone take notes just record the session and then send the memo to those that need it.
9. Emails
Kind of mentioned this one, but voice memos could replace emails in some contexts. I know that sometimes people don’t like typing out emails. Voice memos can work even better in some cases.
10. Instructions
A final one here, although I’m already thinking of a few more, is to record instructions. People use text files for this and we’re using video more, but there is no reason not to use audio to tell people how to do something.
Conclusion
I think audio and voice will have a big future. The curious thing right now is that we have a pretty easy to use technology with voice memos, but for some reason we aren’t really using it. I’ll be curious to see if we start using it more and more in the next 1-3 years. I think we will.