Q and A with Debra Cancro, CEO VoiceVibes

As a speaker coach, I spend a lot of time listening to people’s voices. Some are good; many voices struggle to find their best expression.  But changing one’s voice to become more successful is often difficult work.  Hence, the promise of a technological fix to help with some common voice issues is of great interest to coaches and speakers everywhere.  I was delighted to discover VoiceVibes and Debra Cancro the other day and immediately reached out to speak with her.  Here’s what I learned. 

Debra Cancro is the CEO of VoiceVibes, Inc. which she founded in 2016 to empower people to be more successful communicators. Before that, Ms. Cancro worked in marketing at Broadcom Corporation and for multiple high-tech startups – the last of which was acquired for $242.5M. Before her career in marketing, Ms. Cancro was a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Labs. She holds a patent on a method for detecting condescending speech.

Nick:  Debra, thanks for taking the time to talk to Public Words. You say VoiceVibes proceeds under the premise that a businessperson’s voice strongly affects her career. What do you mean by that?

Debra:  There are many examples in research showing how the way you speak correlates directly to your success, from malpractice lawsuits to sales to elections. Listeners’ perceptions about who you are, if they can trust you or not, whether they want to do business with you or not, are all correlated to the way they perceive features in your voice.

Nick:  Can you give me a quick example?

Debra: Yes. A research team studied a group of surgeons’ voices. Half of them had two or more malpractice lawsuits filed against them and the other half had none. By having people simply listen to audio samples of their voices collected during routine office visits they could predict which group they were in!

In another example, a study we just published with the Center for Creative Leadership in Leadership Quarterly shows that managers in simulated business elections would win among their peers according to the strength of their voice vibes. We call it ‘strength of opening’, but it’s a measure of how captivating (and not boring) they sound. And so, again, it’s showing that those features correlate to the winner.

Nick:  Fascinating. There’s also a study of giving people a quick glimpse of a photograph of candidates and they can predict the winners with surprising accuracy. We tend to vote for people that we like to look at and like to listen to, apparently!

And that gets back to the importance of VoiceVibes and the work that you do, because you can help people have stronger, better, more appealing voices.

Debra:  Exactly. Especially now that everybody’s meeting over Zoom. The way you sound has more and more importance. And your body language is probably less important on a Zoom call than in person. After all, you can only change the way you look so much!  But your voice and the way you talk is something you can practice. So we’re focused on voice because you can improve it.

Nick:  Excellent. What are the criteria by which you judge our voices?

Debra:  We’re really looking at the way you speak, the way you use your voice. We have several measures.  We look at your pace, pausing, upspeak, filler words, how you vary your pitch, do you sound like you’re reading, are you monotone, and so on.  There are a lot of features that are very easy to understand with known best practices around them.

Then we also have A.I. — A.I. models that are looking at more complicated features that predict how others perceive your voice. We leverage both.

Nick:  So there are good voices and bad voices and A.I. can tell the difference? 

Debra:  Yes, but instead of just saying these are good and these are bad, we have listeners’ perception data rated on a scale of zero to 10 on how they rate a speaker in terms of his or her vibes. How boring were they, how confident were they, how captivating were they – we take all that data, all those people’s perceptions, and now the AI is able to score new speech samples accordingly.

Nick:  Fantastic. OK, so let’s get to the difficult question:  how hard is it to improve one’s voice in order to be more successful?

Debra:  What we do is make people aware of how they’re likely to come across to others. We’re not focused on their physical voice, but how they deliver their message. So, changing is not that hard, because as soon as you become aware of it, you can decide to change the aspects of your delivery that you don’t like or that are less successful. We show people, here’s where you sound boring, here’s where you sound captivating. You get samples of when you’re doing well (and less well) so you can do more of the captivating and less of the boring. That way you can go back and think about what you were saying – how can I make it more concise?  How can I make a story around that?

I know for myself, I’ve improved tremendously by using VoiceVibes because seeing the count objectively on my own recording of, for example, my own “umms,” really gives me the motivation to improve.  Or in delivering my investor deck, I realized I sounded boring when I was listing all the credentials of my team, so I changed that up to be more of a summary.

Nick.  I can imagine! OK, let’s say I’m convinced and I’m ready to improve my voice.  What’s the first aspect I should focus on?

Debra:  I think those first 30 seconds at the very beginning, when you’re meeting someone for the first time, or when you’re presenting. Focus on that opening! If you can only do one thing, I think that’s essential because if you have a powerful opening and you get their attention and you resonate with your audience everything else will go better because of it.

The other thing that I’ve come to realize is that your ideal voice is when you are talking naturally at home to your spouse or to your friends – the way you talk when you’re comfortable. That’s your authentic self. These days authenticity is becoming more and more appreciated.

Nick:  Wonderful! Now, last question. Tell us about VoiceVibes. How did the company start and how have you and the company grown together?

Debra: In the early days in my career as an engineer, my boss wanted me to practice a presentation before talking to stakeholders. I remember presenting to a nearly empty conference room with just him and how uncomfortable that was. I did not get why it was necessary. I thought if I know my stuff, why should I need to practice right now?

Later in life, of course, I realized that practicing and sounding confident and preparing are way more important than even knowing your stuff, because nobody is going to listen to you if you’re not presenting it well.

Those are the people I want to help, people that have great ideas or are really smart, but don’t appreciate the skills of communication, because in engineering school that wasn’t something that they were taught.

Nick:  Thanks, that’s great. Where can people look if they want to know more? 

Debra:  Our website is myvoicevibes.com.

Nick, Thank you, Debra!