Tero Tolonen – VP Global Product Management, Jabra

Denmark-based gabra, a subsidiary of GN Netcom that makes in-ear and on-ear audio wearables, is one of the leaders in engineering communications and sound solutions. Through sound, the company aims to transform lives. Jabra engineering excellence leads the way, building on 150 years of pioneering work. The company employs approximately 1,100 people worldwide, and reported annual revenue of Danish Krone (Dhh) 4KT billion (os 49K4 billion approximately) in 2018K fn a conversation with My Mobile, the company’s top executive Tero Tolonen, VP Global Product Management spoke about the importance of technology, productivity, consumer growth and many morek eere are the edited excerpts from the interaction.

How will technology further enable productivity in the coming years? In an ideal world, technology isn’t something you will experience at all; it should fundamentally work for us, rather than get in our way. Living in a time-poor world, we are all challenged in focusing on the right things in order to get the most out of a finite period, but technology adoption is where our productivity enhancements lie. What we’re doing is trying to understand human ability and preferences to enable things like voice to become the next user interface (UI) in both consumer and enterprise domains. Voice is a perfect example of a

more natural and simpler way to engage with services that unlock time and

“Our products are a voice gateway and with our microphone experience and audio processing algorithms, we can enable highquality voice pickup to bring rich voice experiences to users, helping them live more smartly”

productivity in our days, underpinned by the enabling technology.

How will this affect consumers?

In the consumer domain, we’ve been successful with true wireless, and we want to continue developing that so that you have an immersive sound experience with something so small and practical that you don’t even notice it and can wear it all day. It can be acoustically transparent, or enhance certain sounds while blocking out others. We’re focused on developing voice UI for our products, making them richer and more complex in order to enable users further. Our products are a voice gateway and with our microphone experience and audio processing algorithms, we can enable high-quality voice pickup to bring rich voice experiences to users, helping them live more smartly.

How will the next wave of technology impact office productivity?

In enterprise, the big focus is how to take knowledge worker productivity to the next level. I’m excited about voice interaction and how voice starts to become more of an enabler in the office space. We have tackled noise in the open office and building on that, the next step is how to enable voice in the workplace to increase productivity. People are getting used to talking to machines, and when that behavioral instinct takes over we can immobilize it and focus on further delivering new voice experiences. Look at the advances we have made in sound management. At first it was with active noise cancellation (ANC), which is now fully consumer adopted. Now, can we extend that and look at helping people to control and manage their sound environments more broadly. How we’re going to interact with collaboration solutions will change over time. You will increasingly use your voice in different ways in the work context to interact with your technology. Cortana, backed by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services is going to change the way how users interact with

“Cortana is going to change the way how users interact with machines. We will see a shift to two-way communications, in which we not only invoke our voice assistants to perform tasks, but they start to engage with and prompt users in order to streamline our workflows”

machines. We will see a shift to two-way communications, in which we not only invoke our voice assistants to perform tasks, but they start to engage with and prompt users in order to streamline our workflows in software like Office365.

Will voice control change the spaces in which we work?

Probably, it won’t shift to voice-only, because vision is also such a powerful sense. So, we will still use screens, but voice will enable new and faster collaboration with a machine. It won’t replace screens, but it will vastly extend them. You can understand some things so much better through vision and vice versa with sound, so it’s about maximizing that interplay rather than replacing one with the other. With work spaces, office workers will still need spaces for individual work, but the physical concept of a meeting room is where we will see great enhancements. Naturally, if we’re talking more to our devices, there will be more distractions. But active noise cancellation and Smartsound will accelerate at the same rate. Things like speech-focused ANC, with noise-cancelling algorithms for speech will technologically solve the rise of voice use in the office. ■