Welcome to Joe Bury's Summurai playlist

We’ve already mentioned that audio has a competitive advantage in being easy to consume as a secondary activity. But we haven’t discussed another, much more interesting advantage that audio has. Audio content allows you to break the ice and create a warmer, more emotional, and more personal interaction with your customers. When you start out creating your audio content, you’ll soon be asking yourself what kind of voice you want to represent your organization’s message and brand. When we’re no longer using the cold, impersonal tone of printed text, we must choose the right presenter to best convey your brand.

Who would you like your customers to meet, and what tone of voice should he or she have?

Making content accessible using a friendly human voice is not a gimmick. It simply can’t be done any other way. When you or your customers consume audio content as a secondary activity – say, while driving – most of your cognitive resources must stay focused on the primary activity, and not on deciphering some strange voice. So, if we hear the voice of a robot or very official-sounding narrator, our cognitive system chooses the easy way out and simply filters them away. In order to pass through this listening barrier, the content must be delivered in a down-to-earth manner, in a tone similar to that of a friendly radio host, or the person sitting next to us in our car. Only this type of content will register with us.

When you start your journey creating audio content, it’s important to remember not just to read the text, but also to understand how the text can break the ice and come across as a friendly conversation. Try asking yourself who your customers would rather be talking to, and what kind of hat your representative needs to be wearing while recording their narration. This will help you identify the most suitable voice for your brand.

Let’s summarize.
If you’ve come this far, you have gotten to know Summurai personally. You know who we are and what we can do, and you have experienced our Summies for yourself. Now you are ready to offer this new communication channel to your customers. We’ll be thrilled to help create this new content format for you and make it accessible using the tools of Summurai.

We live in an age of endless information overload. On the one hand, we all have a real need to know a lot more about more topics, but then again, the amount of global content is increasing at an astounding rate, while the quality of content is steadily deteriorating. And how are we ever going to manage reading everything that we find interesting with the little time we have available, anyway?

The role of the Summurai team – our curators, writers, voice artists and editors – is twofold. Firstly, they ensure that bad content does not make its way to the designated audience. Secondly, they identify the quality content and chop it up into small and precise pieces of content, which will convey all that is needed to know in the most accurate and minimalist way possible.

We have created a new unit of content which we call a Summy. The Summy is the sushi of the content world. It is small, accurate, and super effective. It’s composed of around 300 to 400 words, and is served up as audio and text, making it easily consumable at any time. A Summy can be a short piece of content, or a summary of an academic treatise, article, blog post, video, podcast, or online lecture. You can create your own Summies, or you can get our Summurai team to create them for you.

Our Summurai team can write standalone Summies or locate the best articles and online content, summarize them, and voice-record them.

In the age of machine learning and algorithms vying to replace humans, we are on the side of humanity. So all this is done by our team – not by machines. The summaries are written only by people with knowledge in field and an understanding of the article’s topic.

We pack the Summies into SummyBoards – content playlists in various topics. A SummyBoard can be a closed playlist or one that is regularly updated. It can be open to the general public or require registration, and its content can be free or paid.

This content board is “webby”, meaning that it’s available as an online link, without the need to install an app, or any other barrier standing in the way. You can send links to a full playlist of Summies or to a single Summy.

The SummyBoard is a white label – it will take on your logo and branding and become another content channel in your relationship with your target audience. You can either host this content channel with us or place it under your own domain.

SummyBoards and Summies are created using Dojo – a super-advanced management system of our own creation, which we just love. Dojo lets you create Summies and monitor their performance with statistics that show you what works and what can be improved upon. You can also add call to action buttons to your Summies – a link to a purchase page, a phone contact, or navigation to a physical location using a mobile phone.

Summurai playlists are a new means of giving busy audience access to your content. They can form part of the sales process, accompany your user experience processes, provide an alternate platform for your blog or online content marketing, or they can even be used as a means of communication for your team, to keep them updated on what they need to know. We’ll elaborate on these cases over the next few Summies.