This morning I read an article in the Financial Times titled, Bloggers banish the keyboard.  This article goes on to demonstrate that bloggers are discovering speech-to-text conversion technologies from companies such as SpinVox, Nuance Communications and Tellme.  The basic point being that instead of using the keyboard bloggers can simply use their phone and the entries show up, nearly in real-time, on their blog. 

This brings to mind for me a conference I attended 12+ years ago when I worked in the publishing industry.  Novell, at that time had a product that allowed me to listen to my email while on the road.  In addition to converting text to voice, the product offered a universal inbox for email and voice messages.  Really, it was quite useful.  Long before smart phones and Blackberries, I found it very productive to dial into my universal inbox and listen to my email.  I was stunned when I moved to Arizona in 1995 and discovered that my new employer was standardized on an email platform that had no such capability.

Anyway, the point in tying the Novell experience to the current article is that although text-to-speech is nice there are a couple of cautions I propose when using speech-to-text, especially from a remote location.

1)  Remember live TV and live radio?  There is no editing.  The same goes for live blogging.  There is an old saying that I was taught in my youth:  it is better to remain silent and to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

2)  In publishing, I've been taught that when writing to the general public, we should write at an 8th grade level.  This is a useful guide when writing.  Blogging, however, tends to be a free for all, even in written form and bringing ad-hoc voice commentary to the web will only prove the point that most of us are lousy public speakers - filling our sentences with ummm, aah, long moments of silence and slurred speech.

So, where's the silver lining in this and what does it have to do with automated marketing processes?

Every company with call center operations can use a blog and voice-to-text conversation to create real-time training from their best customer service agents, sales executives and channel partners or highly relevant solutions based on real-time customer feedback and conversations.  The fact that voice conversations can be converted from audio to text, means the conversations can be indexed, categorized and searched for contextual understanding that will allow a company to respond in much better fashion to their customers.