Below are a few thoughts and items on matters sonic -- voice, sound and audio -- that we hope you will find interesting.
1. Fact of the week: "According to a survey held among U.S. adults between January and February 2022, the share of respondents who reported ever having listened to an audiobook amounted to 45 percent. The percentage has remained relatively stable since 2020, indicating little growth in terms of new consumers engaging with the format. That being said, audiobook revenue continues to grow consistently each year." For more, please go here.
2. Worth reading:
3. Worth listening to: From Jodi Krangle's "Audio Branding" podcast: "Audio Logos: An Interview with Dr. David Allan - Part 2"
4. Worth watching: The latest episode of Lingofest. This past week, we premiered Part One ofur interview with brothers Ben and Sam Martin, two philosophy graduates who are innovating in the Natural Language Processing and AI in general by building a system that is based neither on the traditional rules-based strategy, nor on the newly data-heavy methodology, but rather focuses on leveraging concepts and methods inspired by Edumund Husserl's work in phenomenology to create a new unsupervised machine learning technique called Random Contrast Learning (RCL). A fascinating conversation and certainly a great example of how those steeped in the humanities can bring something news to the AI Table.
o5. Post an audio: We are collecting the Sounds of Summer '22. If there's a sound that you would like to share that captures for you the sound of Summer, please go here share it with us. At the end of the summer, we will publish The Summer 2022 Audio Wall soundcasing the audio submitted to us.
Last couple of things:
- To sign up for a Witlingo account, please go here.
- For a summary of the main highlights on the latest upgrade of the Witlingo platform, please go here.
- To order Witlingo's CEO's newly released book, "The Elements of Voice First Style," (O'Reilly Media, 2022), please go here.
- To listen to an audio summary of this newsletter and previous newsletter, check out the audio carousel below.
Sonic Sunday -- The Boom is Coming! is a weekly digest on interesting matters Sonic, brought to you by Witlingo. To receive the newsletter via email, please click here. For an archive of previous issues, please click here.