Helena Sjogren from Reedz introduces us to the text to voice tools they use

Oh, you're very welcome. And it's rather interesting. I'm in Honolulu. You're in Stockholm. probably about 8,000 miles apart. And the sound at times is going to waver in and out. So I hope the audience will bear with us. Elena's with Reeds, which is an artificial intelligence-based business that translates, takes things from Word documents into audio tracks. And we are conducting together a beta test to determine the viability of how this works with Learning Without Scars. So that's going to be the root of our conversation with Helena. So perhaps you can start, Helena, with tell us a little bit both about yourself and also about REITs.

You have a full love.

yes and that's that's what we that's what we saw as well one of the things Our library of learning tools, if you will, is in English, French, and Spanish is the foundation. And what I saw with Reeds was the opportunity for us to be able to determine what should be the fourth language. By expanding at the moment, we do English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese with Reeds. And we put 50 documents out there that'll be on the Reeds site. 10 documents,20% of the content is on learning without scars, kind of a taste treat, if you will. And we have a link on our website directly over to Reeds, which in earlier discussions, Helena and I were talking about, we should have that link go straight to the app so that the people that are looking from our site would download the app and make it easier for our clients to be able to see things on Reeds. And you offer, I think, a free trial for a period of time at the beginning. Is that correct?

Yeah, that's what I saw when we were first talking about it. I ran into Reeds because of a relationship that I had with a lady, one of, I think you're eight, who I worked with at Volvo. And when I was doing training for them, we seem to have a similar goal in mind. We're trying to create a platform of resources. Let me just call it that way. For anybody who wants to achieve what we aim at is help people identify their potential and then give them the tools and the paths whereby they can achieve their potential. I think it's a very common, a very similar track that we're both on, which is what appealed to me. I don't know what the fourth language should be that we develop. English, French, and Spanish are pretty common across the planet, but there's a lot of people that don't speak those three languages, and I didn't know which number four should be. And I'm wanting to use Reeds as a platform to determine which one it should be.

So that's what our motivation was. And like you say, it's almost impossible to determine whether it's a computer talking or a person. It's remarkable. So congratulations. That's quite an accomplishment.

Yes. Yeah, so, you know, we gave you 50, I believe, Word documents that you've converted. Everybody can see all 50 on our website in English, and the Europeans seem to like the British accent better than the American accent. So we've got English two ways, one American, one British. And then we've got 10 French, Portuguese, and Spanish, which we can get once the link is established over to Reeds, they can get all 50 in those languages as well. And then it's... a race to go two directions. One, add more languages with the original 50, and two, add more documents to the original 50 so that we get to 100,200, whatever the number is. So that's kind of, I think, where we are very much alike and aimed at the same thing. And like you're a startup, we're in the internet-based learning, we're rather young as well. I guess starting in January of 2020, we've had about 2,800 products, classes or assessments sold.

And so we're starting to get the traction going. I'm hopeful this year we'll have 5,000, next year 10,000. It's a matter of scaling, which is your specialty or one of them. And I suspect the same thing's true with reads looking commercially. Some of the other languages, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, unfortunately not Hawaiian, have very few commercial items available, but that we can change. So it's an exciting time to be with you. It's early in your business life and early in ours.

an interesting thing we were talking earlier before this recording that I used to be the youngest person in almost every room I was in for the longest period of time, and it shocked me when I wasn't. But the reason that I bring that up is my generation, the boomers, and even to some degree, the millennials aren't attuned to the Gen X and Gen Z. This is right down their alley. This is where things are. A close friend of mine has 13 patents. where he can control your screen, not with your keyboard, but with his eyeball. So we have no idea what technology is, where it's going to take us and how it's going to influence our lives. Other than we do know that the use of this tool, the internet, I started using it in 1973, believe it or not. And all that was on the internet in those days was banks, financial institutions, and large governments. And it was really easy to get around. Search was not an issue. Response was not an issue.

Teleprocessing speed, band rates were ridiculously low,30 baud. Well, today, you can flip almost everything instantaneously. The problem is democratizing content so that somebody in the depths of Colombia or India or... the Arctic in Canada or Africa, who can go to a library, can have access to the same material that everybody in the world has, or any specialist in the world has. That's not been true for long. So Gen Z, Zen X, this is perfect for them. An interesting statistic. Today in North America, I don't know Europe at the moment. Today in North America,93% of the transactions, commercial transactions, are first initiated with an inquiry online. So if you don't have an online presence, you're going to be missing a whole heck of a lot of business in the future. The other thing that's interesting in North America, over 90% of the purchasing commercial transactions are being conducted by millennials, Gen Z and Gen X.

So my generation, we're done. We're out the other side. We're risk averse. We're change resistant. These younger folks, they want to get with the program right now.

and they want it now. Yes, ma 'am. Yes. How come I'm waiting? What is this?

Yeah, I think we're at the beginning, and this is a little nasty comment. I think we're at the beginning of what I'm going to call lifelong learning. My generation and perhaps the older millennials used to consider that when you left school, your learning stopped. And my contention has always been that when you leave school, the learning begins. In school, you get a foundation that allows you, that gives you the tools to be able to proceed in your personal development. And it's, you know, one of, and Lena and one of your other members has heard me say this. If somebody tells you you have a lot of potential at 16, that's a heck of a compliment. It's wonderful. But if they tell you that and you're 66, you have to wonder what you've been doing the last 50 years. So, you know, we need to give people the tools if they want. I can't, I can't, there's a large portion of the population that won't be interested in this.

But the population that is, we need to be able to give them the tools such that they can go out and expand it. And if you're not failing, you're not, you're not pushing the edge. You got to fail. It's okay. Get up, change, modify. Here we go. And our rate of change is now skyrocketing on an exponential curve that scares the devil out of a lot of people. At some point it'll scare me, but not yet.

Yeah, one of the famous, one of my favorite comments is, what would you do if you weren't afraid? Take fear off the table. What do you want to do? And if we do that, you know, there's the openings and the possibilities are endless. And that's how we got as a species, that's how we got where we are, but we have a long way to go. It's exciting. Yeah,

Yes.

Yeah. The question why is an important one. And when you stop asking why, the answer to the question why is not because, which is a whole, a lot of people say the answer to the question why is why not. And curiosity is a key driver to that. And, you know, one of our colleagues and contributors is a gentleman by the name of Ed Gordon, who's written about 20 books. He's got a couple of PhDs. I don't want him to hear me say he's a rather smart man because he'll never get through the door. His head will get so big. But he has a comment. And I think it's a prediction that is reasonably accurate that by 2030. half of the U.S. workforce will not have the skills to be employable. So on top of this transition to curiosity being satisfied, lifelong learning enacted, we have the fear sociologically of how will we as societies look after the people that are not employable anymore. So there's a whole host of things that are coming along with this.

chains that are below the surface of the water that are going to start popping up, which we're going to have to deal with. But at the moment, what you're doing in providing a fact-based platform with wonderful voice translations and what we're doing, providing content to our specific industries, it's the beginning. There will be a lot more of this from a lot of different sources. And it's all aimed at the same thing, helping people get better at what they are professionally and personally.

Democratization, yeah. Yeah.

English is a strange language.

No, no.

You make a really valid point. Over my work life, you have seen in publishing houses, their goals are to make money. So they've created stars. So if I look at a publishing house, there might be 20 authors, might be 10, might be 50. But there's thousands of them that don't see the light of day because an editor somewhere didn't think this could be commercially viable for the publishing house. And I understand that. But publishing houses have a finite life as well. The book printing business is under serious challenge. Just think for a moment about stamps on envelopes and mail and what happened when instant messaging and email arrived. I can see the day 50 years from now, stamps will no longer be there. Snail mail will no longer be there. Books is the same type of thing. I like history, so I have to, you know, it's very hard for me to get books written for society in 3500 BC. There's very few places. but I can get them online.

And they're now being transferred from documents in paper. They're being scanned and made available. Now you can go from text to voice. It's just imagine when every document ever written is available online in audio format and voice format, then imagine that every person on the planet. People running around with any shoes on that might be only have one meal a day can go to a library and for free access that. You know, and I used to talk about how many Einsteins are there in Africa. And if you've got a number system in Africa, that's one, two, many, many, many, many. What happens if those folks get educated or provided the educational tools that how many more Einsteins are there and how much more can they help the human race? get better at life and everything else. It's, it's a path. And it's, I, I think this is terrific. I wish you all the luck in the world and, and hope together we can be successful at this, at this process.

Yeah. And yes, there's been over a thousand people read on our website, your blog post, let alone on the other social media that we put things up on. And I encourage you to give me more because the more we can expose reads and other thinking, the better we're at. Have we missed anything on explaining and describing reads and the relationship between reads and learning without scars?

Well, thank you. I have enjoyed it as well. And I think we've done a reasonably good job of introducing it to everybody. So to the audience listening, thank you for listening to Helena. Thank you for participating and helping us. And I look forward to having further conversations with you. And to the audience, tune in for the next Candid Conversation. In Hawaiian, we say for thank you, mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.