Useful Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction. There’s an estimated 33 million voice-first, AI enabled devices in homes today and the mass adoption is indisputable evidence of AI’s growing influence in today’s world.
AI has been particularly compelling within the audio industry. While a somewhat unexpected combination, the marriage of AI and audio comes on the back of the popularity of smart assistants. This has put AI in the limelight and has brought back audio from the shadows of video-related content online.
From a 10,000 foot view, AI systems deliver a pre-programmed set of responses and can only respond to a pre-set number of questions. AI essentially decides what actions are the most appropriate to take based on a combination of data sets fed over a period of time.
AI takes Center Stage in Audio Search
In the past, audio content had its set of challenges due to the lack of an organized repository or archive making it almost impossible to sift through. Although from a search perspective, we currently have established and robust search engines that are capable of pulling up millions of text-based articles or videos, almost no platforms that are able to provide results that are purely in an audio format – including specific audio clips from local radio stations or podcasts.
At Audioburst, we aim to change that. AI is making voice, once the golden child with the advent of the radio, a next generation technology. That technology essentially delivers the building blocks allowing audio content to be indexed and easily searched online, in the same manner as text or video. Our adoption of AI and machine learning tools help us analyze millions of minutes of live and pre-recorded audio content each day. Through this process, we create live transcriptions of speech, which are then turned into digestible audio clips that are indexed and tagged so that they are searchable by keyword, context or topic.
This then establishes an ecosystem in which audio content consumption and discovery is in line with the consumer demand and appetite for voice-based search and voice-first experience. And, as new consumer devices, geared towards delivering and interacting with content through voice, continue to spread and become more popular, audio delivery as a search result will become mainstream.
Additionally, the audio content itself – and its creators – are the biggest benefactors from this new wave powered by AI. The ability to make audio more searchable has granted the genre a new lease on life, prolonging the shelf life of the content and allowing it to reach a wider audience. The indexing of audio via AI makes this type of content much more shareable, which inevitably delivers greater value to content creators as well as generates new opportunities for new voice-related content.
More conversational search will ensure that AI grows smarter and better understands user intent—it’s very much a mutually beneficial relationship where the more it’s put into practice, the better and more refined the process becomes.
Above all, AI’s functionality rests on the data that feeds into it. As our lives become increasingly interconnected, AI technologies that are fueling the transition to voice search will experience a huge wave enabling the technology to become more accurate and deliver a more personalized audio experience and voice search.
Ultimately, humans are most used to voice interactions. We use our voice on a daily basis and it’s the unique characteristic that brings everyone together. The value of AI is its ability to better understand and predict what users actually want, based on data from users’ patterns, behavior, language and preferences. AI offers a concrete business application for voice-activated and audio-related industries, ensuring that audio content can compete in an increasingly screen first world.
