Kelly Fitzsimmons, our CEO and co-founder, gave a speech recently at the 2010 Mobile Voice Conference. She described why original voice matters. It appears Malcolm Gladwell would agree.

In his book Blink, Gladwell wrote about the power of original voice. It was in a passage early into the book, about recognizing doctors who are lower insurance risks.

Should something go awry, doctors who are particularly brusque with their patients are far more likely to get sued. The statistics are dramatic. Regardless of the outcomes delivered, doctors with good bedside manners are better malpractice insurance risks.

The question that Gladwell explored was: How quickly and reliably can people tell a doctor’s potential bedside manner?

His answer was that because our brains are designed for what he calls thin slicing, the time it takes is remarkably brief. What’s more, thin slicing yields a surprisingly high level accuracy.

Psychologist Nalini Ambady took tapes of original voice. They were of surgeons talking to patients. For the purpose of the study, she did these two things to them:

1. She removed key tones that help listeners make out meanings, leaving nothing but intonation.
2. She trimmed those garbled voice clips until they were super-short. The theory goes that our gut feelings take effect practically in an instant. It’s Gladwell’s thin slicing at work.

Using a series of these 10-second clips of gibberish, Dr. Ambady was able to have subjects rate the voices on things like, “warmth, hostility, dominance and anxiousness.” Gladwell added that, “By using only those ratings, [Dr. Ambady] could predict which surgeons got sued and which ones didn’t.”

We’ve seen this first-hand. Users of VoiceScreener interviews are finding tremendous value in voice clips that often are no longer than 20 seconds.

It’s true that these interviews carry semantic information. In other words, someone reading a transcript of the answers would find them instructive. That’s the value that many are pursuing by “taking apart” original voice. But Gladwell, and Dr. Ambady, remind us that even if you remove the meaning of the spoken word, there is much that remains.

Thin slicing is evidence of how original voice can carry tremendous valuable when used in VoiceScreener, or some other HarQen original voice application.