Audio Holiday Carol from Your Friends at GM Voices
Posts Tagged Voice Prompts
GM Voices Movember ‘Stashy Awards 2011
An Awards Gala for the Ages Commemorating Our Committed Mo Bros and Mo Sistas; Nearly $1,000 Raised for Charity
GM Voices‘ first annual ‘Stashy Awards, held November 30, celebrated our involvement with Movember, a month-long moustache growing event to raise awareness and funding for men’s health issues like prostate cancer. Many of use grew outstanding moustaches, and, all in all, we raised just under $1,000 to fund cancer research programs. It was a fantastic, moustashtic event.
Here is a picture scrapbook documenting the 2011 ‘Stashies. Click the images to enlarge to full size.
The enraptured audience waits for the ceremony to begin.
Award nominee Andrew Bates ponders his chances.
Mo Sistas Emily and Donna deep in moustache contemplation.
The Stay Classy San Diego award for best anchorman moustache went to Rick Campbell.
The Purple Rain award for best Prince-style light moustache went to John Monsalve.
The Hulkamania award for best Hulk Hogan-style horseshoe moustache went to Marcus Graham.
The In Like Flynn award for best Errol Flynn-style pencil moustache went to Justin “Dos” Fennell.
The King of Sting award for best Apollo Creed-style standard moustache went to E.J. Smith.
The Magnum award for best Tom Selleck-style cop moustache went to Justin Cody.
The World’s Most Interesting Moustache award for best salt-and-pepper moustache went to Jay Steinworth.
The Mel Blanc’s Yosemite Sam award for best voice actor with a moustache went to Andrew Bates.
The Gold Medal Freestyle award for best Mark Spitz-style standard moustache went to Tim Shoemaker.
The Smokey and the Bandit award for best Burt Reynolds-style 70s throwback moustache went to Darrell Hensley.
The Frida Kahlo award for Mo Sista of the year went to Jessica Harrison. In absentia, Chad Harrison won The Ron Swanson award for best big and bushy all-American moustache.
The winner of our Best of Lionel Richie CD was Emily Harrison.
Heroes and frontiersmen. GM Voices’ 2011 Mo Bros.
Heroines and pioneers. GM Voices’ 2011 Mo Sistas.
Doubling Up: Visit GM Voices at SpeechTEK and ClueCon Next Week!
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!
Next Up: SpeechTEK 2011
Same Great Show; New Venue, Less Wizardry
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.
1985: It Was a Very Good Year (for Voice Automation)
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.
Better Service. Better Sound. Better Digs.
“Explore the space” with GM Voices; our process and facility make all the difference.
Anyone with a tape deck and a microphone in a basement can profess to be in the voice recording business. Technically, it may be accurate, but really, is that the kind of operation you want to entrust your customer contacts with? There really is no comparison when you consider the size, scope and service level of GM Voices.
GM Voices is headquartered from a 10,000 square foot production facility in Alpharetta, GA, just north of Atlanta. In addition to all the space dedicated to standard business stuff (sales, accounting, marketing), we boast a dozen combined recording studios, isolation booths and editing suites, all stocked with the latest and greatest recording gear.
Whenever we host a guest and are able to give a tour of our studios, the visual component of value proposition is communicated–voice recording is a serious business that warrants dedicated account management resources, a trained group of engineers and the experience to make your speech application connect with callers in any market.
Check out this short video overview of CEO Marcus Graham discussing our digs.
The Many Varietals of English
Best for International Applications, Sometimes Neutral “American” English isn’t the Way to Go
English is the generally accepted international language of commerce. Outside of a country’s native language, English is almost always the top alternative for IVR voice prompts and marketing/business narration. But the approach should be considered carefully. GM Voices’ English deployment recommendation varies depending on the calling audience of the application.
For North American apps, we almost universally recommend a neutral, unaccented “Midwestern American” English voice. If you browse our Weekly Session voice actors on our voice library, you’ll notice that most everyone conforms to this standard. It’s the style least likely to offend someone’s sensibilities anywhere in the country.
But the American English style doesn’t work for non-U.S. applications, even with many English-language callers. To this end, GM Voices offers a great variety of international accented English dialects; some predictable, some surprising. Certainly, UK English is an important dialect in Europe, and GM Voices offers other accented English voices to best connect to English-as-a-first-language callers: Australian, Irish, even Canadian. Some others wouldn’t immediately come to mind, but do make sense; English in Indian, Singapore and Swiss accents. These countries have enough English-language callers to use that language on automation, but require a localized variation to better connect with callers.
It should be noted that GM Voices uses locally-authentic voice actors for every language and dialect, the exact opposite of what this young lady accomplishes all herself. Give this video a watch and note how different dialects would be essential for local caller acceptance.
Enterprise Connect: T-Minus Three Weeks
Our Mission, Our Theme and a Little Taste of What to Expect
February 28th marks the inaugural edition of Enterprise Connect, formerly VoiceCon, at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando. As a faithful reader of this blog, you know that we’ve created a music video (two versions) to commemorate last year’s event, which can be found here (original) and here (outtakes).
GM Voices often themes its booth displays for a bit of fun and pun. This year, partially to coincide with the new park at Universal, we will be exhibiting with a Harry Potter theme. As in, “with GM Voices’ natural-sounding voice prompts in over 100 languages and dialects, we help your company deliver a magical customer experience.”
If you’d like complimentary floor passes, please get in touch with Karen Smith (ksmith at gmvoices dot com).
We’ll be bringing audio engineer and HP enthusiast Andrew Bates, who in turn will be bringing several HP-costumed friends. To give you a taste of the style and commitment of these dedicated cosplayers, check out this mini-documentary of Andrew and gang at Infinitus, an HP extravaganza that took place this past summer. That’s dedication, holmes.
Everyone Connects: This Time, Even More Crazy
The Outtake Version We’re Not Sure We Even Want to Show You, but Are Anyway.
A few months ago, GM Voices premiered a music video called “Everyone Connects (Enterprise Connect, GM Voices, Avaya).” You can read that original post and watch the video here. That video, while seemingly chaotic and full of shenanigans, was actually very carefully considered, storyboarded and edited. From inception to release, it took us about nine months.
Well, we’ve created an alternate version. This one was assembled from all our outtakes, as well as a “live” performance by the GM Voices Nerd Boys Band in the call center next door to our production facility. This video is chaotic, full of shenanigans… and basically just thrown together. And that’s why it’s so much fun!
If you’ve never seen our original—please, watch it first. You need some context. But then, watch this video and celebrate the never-ending zaniness that is “Everyone Connects (Enterprise Connect, GM Voices, Avaya) Live Outtake Version.”
“Let’s Talk About” Voice Prompts
Video Best Practice Series from Marcus Graham
GM Voices recently completed a series of informational video interviews on Voice Branding topics such as auto attendant, IVR, and of course, professional voice actors for telephony. Each topic is collected on our main website. These are easy to understand, high-level overviews of the fundamental tenets of creating a great caller experience for your customers. Check them out over your morning cup o’ joe.
Here’s a sample:
