Maybe you can’t visit GM Voices in person. This saddens us, but, unfortunately, it’s all too common. Hey, we understand. We’re based out of Atlanta. Maybe you’re not. Plus, you’re probably pretty busy. Realizing all these budgetary and travel limitations, we did the next best thing: We brought the tour to you instead.
Spend a few minutes taking the GM Voices video tour, a guided trek through our recording studios that explains who we are, what we do, and how we can do it so well. It’s kind of like Christopher Walken’s SNL skit “The Continental,” just without all the parts that are wildly inappropriate in a business setting.
When people visit us in person and see our people and learn about our very refined process, they understand why a relationship with GM Voices is such a good business decision. Check it out!
For decades, Sam Elliott has made his bones as a throwback to a better, simpler America, when men were men and moustaches were symbols of status and potent virility. Elliott and that bushy horseshoe ’stache are icons of Western and cowboy film and iconography. Rumor has it that Sam’s moustache is a quicker draw of the six-shooter than even the man himself.
And Elliott is no stranger to the world of voice overs. His is the voice of Coors, and he’s leant that measured Western twang to many companies seeking a Voice Brand imbued with charimastic manliness.
We at GM Voices crack open a can of ice-cold Coors Light and commend the moustache and talents of the incomparable Sam Elliott.
Lunchin’, Learnin’ and Some Prizes for Good Measure
Thanks to the Georgia chapter of SOCAP and everyone who attended “The Customer Experience in New Media,” GM Voices’ lunch ‘n’ learn event on 9/22. During our roundtable discussion, we reviewed several cool case studies of brands using new and emerging media to better connect with customers. Social media, business Web video, mobile apps, online communities and contests were among those discussed. Good times!
Congrats to Ms. Sharon Moon of AVDS for winning our iPad raffle. And actually, she asked for the receipt so she could immediately upgrade her model. Picky, picky. (Kidding!)
Also, a golf clap for Sandy Tafur of PossibleNOW for winning a gift certificate for having the best new media example; The Direct Marketing Compliance Channel, a 400-member LinkedIn group discussing the ever-changing legislation and best practices of direct marketing across all channels. Astutely, Sandy chose a Buckhead Life gift certificate, which added an additional $10 to her card. Clearly this is a shrewd businesswoman!
Thanks Greg L’Amoreaux of Kelly Services for helping us stay organized, and a firm handshake to Mark Palmucci of Interactive Intelligence for emceeing on short notice.
SpeechTEK Starts 8/8 in NYC, ClueCon 8/9 in Chicago
If you’ve happened upon this blog post in a very timely fashion, there’s a good chance you’ll be attending SpeechTEK or ClueCon. And, likely, you’re only going to one conference. We know it was a tough decision for you.
But thanks to the wonders of planning, GM Voices will be attending both shows! We love speech technologies and open source telephony equally—it would be like choosing one child over another!
At SpeechTEK, stop by booth 214 and say hello to Misters Jay Steinworth and Kevin John. Also, please evaluate all our new signage and displays. This blogger worked hard on them. Feedback appreciated!
At ClueCon, a less formal affair, find the newly hitched Mrs. Jessica Harrison (née Goulding) gabbing with attendees and taking in the presentations.
Yessir, we’re crisscrossing the country to talk Voice Branding with you, and also to give you a boss light-up pen. We’ll see you everywhere soon!
Check out this SpeechTEK video with several GM Voices cameos!
Being a Fly on the Wall at a GM Voices Talent Review Meeting
Gathered mid afternoon in Studio A, GM Voices’ talent manager, its top directors and audio engineers gather around the console in plush furniture, respective coffees and teas in hand. The lighting is dim, the proper audio-sampling ambiance created. It’s time to get to business.
This is GM Voices’ monthly talent review, a group evaluation of all the demos received in the preceding several weeks. We’re looking for a few good voices, but the obstacles for these prospective roster additions are many. This is only the first cut, and it can be unforgiving. The quality of voice is the primary component, sure. But is the read style natural; the voice demo is produced by reading from a script, but can our panel suspend their disbelief? Is there a market need for this style of voice? Does the voice stand apart from the other gender offerings in this language on our roster? If the demo was recorded internationally, is the studio setup acceptable?
First up is an Italian male voice. The read is clean and professional, but our reviewers agree that it lacks the hard-to-describe “it” factor of the best voice talent. Besides, we’re staffed strongly with Italian males. This voice goes in the “maybe,” pile. He might get a formal audition (the next big step), but it’s doubtful.
Next is a Hindi female voice. She has really good studio arrangements. The read is clean; the sound is distinguished, almost aristocratic. But something seems amiss. “Where did this talent go to school?,” asks our talent manager. “I hear a European influence.” Uh oh. This might be a deal breaker. It’s important that our talent maintain a local, in-country sound. Mark this voice as “investigate further.”
Then, a German male. He has a good sound, but his voice is combined with post-editing, music and sound effects that make it difficult to evaluate on its own merits. We’ll see if he has something a little more streamlined to pass along.
Our reviewers perk up. On deck is a Gujarati male. Interesting. Gujarati is an Indian language not formally offered on our language list. For reasons long and varied, we haven’t yet found the right talent. But maybe this is the guy. His standard read sounds good. So does his studio. In the demo, he also includes some commercial character voices that get a few laughs. Most of our recordings are play-it-straight voice prompts, but any acumen for the “acting” component is always well received. There is more research to be done, but it looks he’ll get a formal one-on-one audition with a GM Voices director.
Following the meeting, our talent manager works on the yeses and maybes. For international languages, the talent need to be authenticated as “native.” Assuming it’s a go, it’s time to talk business—contracts, commitments, compensation, assurance, insurance. All that fun stuff.
Several weeks later, it’ll all begin again. Maybe next month there will be the elusive Gujarati female.
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.
The ‘Why’ and ‘Who’ that Defines Your Company Should Shape Your Voice Brand, Not the ‘What.’
The ultimate goal of any brand is to transcend the base functional benefits of its products and establish an emotional resonance that brings customers back time and time again. Any company that has established this connection—and let’s be honest, it’s kind of rare—has an ingrained swagger. You can immediately throw out details of its identity; its target audience, its reason for existing. These companies market with a mission. If you’ve ever heard of the “golden circle”—you understand the principle. By clearly defining why your company exists, everything else seems to come naturally—a look, a feel, a loyal buying tribe, and an internal brand compass that maintains a sense of purpose and relevance.
Let’s get horticultural. If your overall brand is a tree, the brand essence would be the roots or the trunk. The Voice Brand, the image you project to customers through your phone automation, would at least be a prominent branch. And if those roots go deep, if your brand is strong and well formed, Voice Branding—selecting a voice your speech applications—should be a fun exercise. Likely, you have an idea of what your voice would sound like. Your other customer touchpoints—advertising, an in-store experience, anything—paints an audio picture, so to speak. GM Voices can help you hone in on the sound to perfectly align with these touchpoints, a sound that immediately reaffirms your identity in the caller’s mind (and ear). If your brand occupies this rarefied territory of actualization, there are no excuses for a Voice Branding disconnect.
And then the other side of the coin. If your brand is too focused on outside-in marketing—a heavily commoditized, product-centric, unemotional image—choosing a voice may be difficult. Likely, anything branding related will be difficult, because it hasn’t been defined. Talk to GM Voices about a persona development project. In defining the attributes that will shape your voice to the marketplace, it may uncover some guidelines that will help you target buyers with a more clearly-established identity and purpose. We enjoy these creative consulting engagements, and would be happy to speak to you about your brand.
Check out this short video about the persona design process:
Consumer Brands Allow Creative Voice Opportunities for Automation
Selecting a voice for an automated phone application is often a subjective process. In many cases, several decision makers review sound files—independently or with the GM Voices team—and choose the voice that sounds best to them (and hopefully their calling audience as well).
Other times, clients will defer to us to craft a sound that is uniquely suited for their brand. This is when we get to have fun and be creative. Because no two brands are exactly the same, it only stands to reason that no two Voice Brands should be the same either. A voice persona development project at GM Voices involves an analysis of current brand positioning, through our own research and observations, and in consultation with a company’s brand/marketing teams, to find a sound that matches the company image at all its other customer touchpoints.
It must be said: some brands are just better defined than others. This can be a company weakness that can be attributed to not focusing on projecting a compelling and clearly-defined story, sure… and then some companies occupy a space or industry that just doesn’t allow for us much creativity. For many such companies, “friendly and professional” seems to dominate the direction of the voice.
When companies have a very clear brand image, it’s enjoyable to find a sound that encapsulates that identity to resonate with customers. The more distinct the brand direction, the “bolder” the voice tends to be. Often, a consumer brand—defined by far more advertising and insight into the preferences of the buying audiences—affords greater flexibility for customization than a business-to-business brand. Many sounds that wouldn’t be appropriate for a generalized business crowd succeed on consumer-brand applications because they target a specific, niche audience.
Here are some examples:
Beauty, cosmetics, luxury – These companies provide a great opportunity to utilize a more sultry and aggressive female sound. If the brand is passively (or overtly) defined by an air of exclusivity or sophistication, a very confident and assertive sound can be desirable. This would not translate to a healthcare application, for example.
Blue collar, machinery, auto repair, production – On most applications, a neutral, unaccented voice is preferred to connect with the greatest number of callers. If your brand targets a “dude” audience, a folksier sound, maybe with a twang, can be used where it normally would never be considered.
Retail, electronics, mobile, consumer goods – If your company attracts a younger crowd, use a younger sound. Don’t give customers a branding disconnect (overly mature) if that’s not how you’re positioned at other contact points. If your company attracts a more generalized audience, use a good “middle” sound. If you cater to teens and young adults, use a youthful and vibrant sound to affirm your identity.
Check out this video of CEO Marcus Graham discussing our persona development process:
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.
