Last month, we did our first Hearing Voices in-person event. It was at Betaworks with 200+ people and really drove home for me how many people are excited about the next wave of audio. Thanks to everyone who came! We had people from big companies like Spotify, Bose, and Alexa Fund, the new hot companies like Anchor, and potential newcomers like TTYL. We also had Foursquare, who gave us a sneak peak in what they’re working on at the intersection of physical space and an AirPods-first experience.
Okay, so what’s up this week in audio? Oh I think you know…
Some things I heard from people who were attendees at the conference:
- “Going from V1 to AirPods Pro, I’ve just realized there’s just a crazy amount of ambient noise in my life. Subways, cars, jackhammers construction. Urban life has so much noise pollution. We are never going back to the jack-up-the-volume-while-the-bus-is-going-by way of doing things”
- “Probably the best hardware Apple has put out in 5 years”
- “they are so good”
- “Apple has done it again.”
- Probably my favorite review from a Hearing Voices attendee was “Most importantly, they do not get lost easily” and another replied “Key Feature!”
Okay, what so what else is up in voice? This:
> Try
Trebble.fm – an interesting take on short-form audio discovery
>
For podcasters, try Supercast. It lets you charge for your podcasts. There’s this hack that premium publishers do (e.g., Economist does it), where they’ll give you a personalized link to the audio that you can paste into your podcast player. Supercast seems like it does that as a service. Seems interesting (although I’d want to understand more about the “2x the revenue vs advertising” statement given that initial distribution is more difficult if people have to pay). All that said, their call to action is reason enough to check it out: “
Enough with the MeUndies ads. Supercast makes podcast monetization easy by offering a tool to charge your audience for subscriber-only content.”
What’s up in Synthetic Media?
> Then I came across “
A deep dive into BERT: How BERT launched a rocket into natural language understanding” will help. I thought it was odd that it was from a website called “Searchengineland.” Like, is that website leading the way in neural network knowledge? And then I read from the Search Engine Journal, which is apparently a completely different website, an article called
Google BERT Misinformation Challenged, specifically calling out that “The backlash to the BERT update was swift and without mercy. Many SEOs warned about “how to optimize for BERT” articles before any “how to optimize for BERT” articles were published.” The best tweet was probably…
