When my mother tells people what Jeff and I do for a living, she says we’re in “web-telephony.” When people ask “what’s that?” she politely invites them to ask us. So here’s my best answer, mom. Web-telephony is a fancy way of describing applications that combine the power, flexibility of the web with the ease of use and familiarity of the phone. By combining these two media, we can rapidly create amazingly novel applications off of our platform.

To be clear, we didn’t come up with the rubric “web-telephony.” In fact, we don’t like it very much. It seems outmoded already.

We see our business as a vital part in the evolution of Digital Asset Management (DAM). Prior to HarQen and a handful of other promising start-ups, voice did not make the cut when it came to DAM. It simply wasn’t seen as a media that could be tagged with meta data and easily organized. As our VoiceScreener application demonstrates, that’s no longer the case. Voice can be captured, organized, shared and archived — just like any other medium. As such, we see the HarQen platform as being at the forefront of the Voice Asset Management (VAM) revolution.

Introducing Voice as an Asset

VAM is what we do. Voice as an Asset (VaaA) is the framework that supports our efforts. When is it VaaA? All three of these must be true:

1. The individual unit of voice — or asset — needs to be captured in its natural state, whole and non-deconstructed
2. The asset needs to be tagged and organized so that it can be easily shared, retrieved, reviewed, annotated, ranked and archived
3. A value greater than the initial voice unit needs to be generated. It is relational and benefits from the network effect.

If any one of the three components are not in place, the voice unit cannot be converted into an asset and managed effectively.

To bring this down to earth, VaaA challenges our understanding of how voice applications should work today. The good folks involved in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) have dedicated decades of effort to deconstructing voice — trying to identify tonal qualities that signify stress, anger, even veracity in the voice.

By identifying these qualities, an advanced IVR system can quickly reroute a caller to the proper destination or discern whether an action (e.g., response to a bomb threat) should be taken. These are important, valuable pursuits — but it is not treating Voice as an Asset. In this context, the voice is dissected in the quest for tone. It’s more of an autopsy than an asset.

In the context of capturing voice, think about all the calls that start with “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” Our voices are surely captured, but then what happens? It may surprise you to know that those captured conversations tend to live on large, legacy analog systems where retrieval can take weeks of rewinding … yes, rewinding.

When I say legacy, I mean massive tape machines. For many businesses, these systems are simply too expensive to pull out and replace. And finding anything on that system? Forgettaboutit … Your last screaming tirade on your bank’s customer service line may well have been recorded, but (thankfully) no one is listening.

In the world of VaaA, it’s all about find-and-retrieve. If your voice is going to be an asset, it needs to be easily found.

This is where the fast emerging breakthroughs in voice search can start changing the game. In addition, smart techniques used on the acquisition of voice units can quickly and effortlessly tag the information.

As an example, in our VoiceScreener, a notes field generates and attaches tags identifying and describing job candidate responses. The simple act of capturing the listener’s impressions of a candidate allows anyone to to later search and quickly find that candidate — even when a name is forgotten or missing.

VaaA VAM Value

And finally, a quick word on value. An asset implies value. If you capture a voice that has no greater value than simply the content in the voice unit itself, it is not an asset in the parlance of VaaA. It’s simply a captured audio snippet. An asset implies a relationship. Multiple parties having access to a single voice unit can unlock multiple and disparate value propositions for each stakeholder.

In the world of VoiceScreener, there is a value to the candidate (e.g., time savings); another value for the hiring manager (e.g., ability to listen to interviews at their convenience) and another to the organization (e.g., EEOC compliance thanks to a standardized interview process).

In the wonderful world of VaaA, a single voice asset can provide radically different layers of value to different individuals or entities.

So: VaaA makes VAM go Vroom!

Without the new VaaA framework, VAM is just a fancy concept with little meaning.

The future for VAM on VaaA is bright. Given my experience in information security, I can see how VAM properly employed could be an amazing risk management tool. There is a causal, not correlated, relationship between communication breakdowns and increased enterprise risk. That idea, however, is best left to a later post …

Want to hear a little more about voice asset management? Here’s a recent interview from WisBusiness.com, posted to YouTube. My interview starts at the 4:20 minute mark.

As a side note: Among other questions I’m asked here, the subject of success as a teacher comes up. You can read more of my thought on the matter in this post.