GM Voices set the bar pretty high for trade show themes at last year’s SpeechTEK. (Check out what we did here.) This year, we’re going back to the basics: green shirts, warm smiles, light-up pens, and, of course, voice prompt solutions for any speech-enabled technology.
We’re getting prepped for this year’s show, and it presents new logistics. SpeechTEK has moved from the Marriott Times Square to Hilton New York. A new, unfamiliar floor plan, but we’re ready! While reading up on the keynotes (David Gergen? Nice!) and conference tracks, we found a video embedded on the homepage. Most excellently, GM Voices has several cameos!
Check us getting namedropped at 1:31 and then see our magical booth at 1:54!
Then, hear what our CEO Marcus Graham has to say about SpeechTEK, a New-York-in-the-summertime tradition.
The Founding of GM Voices Highlights a Year of Important Moments
President Reagan is sworn in for his second term. Hulk Hogan and Mr. T team up at the very first Wrestlemania. New Coke debuts and fails. Live Aid brings our most talented (and mulleted) musical personalities together to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. Everyone agrees that Back to the Future is awesome. It is 1985, a year of many cultural landmarks.
Perhaps less celebrated, but nearly as important, is the founding of GM Voices. It’s 1985, and voice automation is still in its infancy—no IVR, TTS, GPS. Actually, acronyms had not even been invented yet. But what did exist was after-hours messaging—“our business is closed.” And it all sounded bad. Enter one man. Like Marty McFly, Marcus Graham came with a vision of the future; a day when branded caller experiences would be omnipresent, a day when companies would have no choice but turn their customer relationships over to automation.
Enter one business—a Rich’s department store in Atlanta. Marcus, a former DJ at Georgia State University and as aspiring voice talent, calls Rich’s after hours and is shocked by what he hears. “This recording is not fitting of the Rich’s brand,” he thinks. Then, a commercial breakthrough: “I can record their messaging in my buddy’s studio, make it sound professional, and I can probably make some money.” And so it was, and so it shall ever be.
Since 1985, GM Voices has exploded as voice automation proliferated across customer-facing technologies—telephony, telematics, business narration and multimedia. The Back to the Future series, while entertaining, was not a predictive force—why did it feature hovering skateboards and not IVRs fronted by natural-sounding, brand-consistent voice prompts from GM Voices? It is a slight we often think about.
Watch this video rumination on 1985, the year it all got started.
GM Voices Makes the Open Road Sound Better than Ever
As we blog, GM Voices is en route to the Telematics 2011 Conference to show developers how to enhance the in-car experience with voice prompts and commands that sound great on GPS, telematics and remote diagnostic applications. GM Voices provides the high-quality recordings for many of the top in-car applications. Not the portable devices, mind you, but the integrated luxury technologies that are made to sound great in top-of-the-line vehicles.
Recording for telematics is different than recording for telephony, but the goal is basically the same—to provide users with a natural-sounding, brand-consistent experience. Check out our GPS/telematics webpage and watch Marcus Graham talk about our road-tested GPS experience.
Dozens of voice actors record in our studios each week, providing clients a consistent voice for any application. More than 90 languages and dialects are offered, with hundreds of voice actors comprising our roster.
We invented the term and concept of Voice Branding, a single-voice customer experience consistent with a company’s brand image.
We pride ourselves on being great storytellers, and we hope this forum helps us spin a few yarns and make some noise. Visit our home base: www.gmvoices.com.
