In the beginning, voice was our original form of communication. The problem with voice, however, was that once the words were spoken, they were gone forever. Out of a desire to share and save ideas, symbols were invented as a surrogate for voice. Written language and the invention of the printing press, allowed us to scale our communications. But a transcript of the original voice had to be good enough.

Then, 150 years ago, something miraculous happened. We figured out how to record voice. For the first time in human history, someone’s actual words could live well beyond the moment in which they were spoken.

When we sit back and listen to recordings of voice, we experience something different than simply reading the transcript. There is personality, there is character and there is life.

It’s been 150 years since we since we first captured voice. The challenge is no longer just capturing it. The challenge is making it readily available and efficiently accessible so that the people can quickly glean value from that voice.

This brings us to today. It is an exciting time for voice. We finally have, for the first time in history, the convergence of all the technologies necessary to capture, organize, distribute, store and share original voice – delivering new forms of value to multiple people in any given network.

At this point, voice becomes an asset.