Shiplake College was honoured to welcome journalist and professional voiceover artist, Jon Briggs, to talk to pupils this week about the power of the voice.
Jon’s talk was broadcast from the Lecture Theatre to students and staff around the College site during Monday lunchtime.
Most people will recognise Jon’s voice as the British voice of Siri. He was also the voice ver in the game show The Weakest Link. As well as this he has had a career as a successful journalist with the BBC and LBC Radio and has interviewed many inspiring and interesting people including Nelson Mandela, Richard Branson and Tom Cruise.
Jon was introduced at the beginning of the session by Year 8 pupil and sports scholar, Freddie Coultas who also happens to be Jon’s godson.
Jon started off his talk by saying: “Your voice is the most important instrument you’ll ever play.”
Your voice can change the way people perceive you, it’s how your friends and family recognise you, it’s the same as your fingerprint - very unique and very important.
“Executives are more likely to judge potential recruits by how they speak than how well they might do the job.” Alan Milburn, The Independent.
But, how you say things is also important. Albert Mehrabian, a professor of psychology in the US says that the words we say only accounts for seven percent of how people judge us. Fifty-five percent of people actually judge us by the facial expressions that come with those words, and 38 percent by the tone of the words.
Jon then talked about how radio and television have used voices over the years, including the decision to use women to read the news and why broadcasters 50 years ago didn’t have regional accents. However, recent research has shown that people are more likely to trust people with certain accents. For example people are more likely to trust people with their money who have northern or Scottish accents!
So it’s a big decision to make when advertising and marketing companies have to choose an artificial voice for their product which will encourage it to fly off the shelves. Artificial voices are bought by companies based on ‘real’ people’s voices for technology, including Siri and the talking clock to name a few.
In fact, Jon first discovered he was the voice of Siri when Apple had launched the technology and he heard it on the BBC News!
Jon finished his talk by telling pupils about what is happening in artificial intelligence now, in relation to personal assistants such as Siri and Amazon Alexa.
Alexa for example has been introduced in an e-bike. You can tell the bike how many calories you want to burn and how fast you want to go and ask it to take you to certain locations. It is also starting to add context to questions from users, relating the answer to a second question to the question that was first asked.
The industry is also working on introducing emotion into their personal assistants to make them seem more realistic to the user. In the future we will all be using computers via voice interaction and gesture (via cameras). There will be no keyboards or mice. That is how you will communicate with technology and the level of investment going into this right now is huge!
Thank you very much Jon for such an interesting and insightful talk!
