The day will come when computers can successfully mimic the human voice without being detectable, but for now, the warmth and idiosyncrasies of human speech are missing.

That’s a challenge for us. Connecting with you through audio becomes a bigger part of what we do every day, and without some technological help, we might have to turn to reporters to take on yet another duty – recording. They have so many duties, already.

We don’t yet have a platform for serving you individual stories via audio via Alexa, Siri and Google Home. You can’t get an audio version of our latest story about Ohio’s big bribery scandal by asking Alexa for the latest on HB6. But the day is fast coming.

We have some experience with delivering news this way. For two years, we participated in a Google experiment to break down two news podcasts into separate audio stories and optimize them for search engines. The items came from our Wake Up morning newsletter and from our weekday news discussion podcast, Today in Ohio.

The experiment taught us a lot about writing for audio and podcasts. People listened to some news items more than 70,000 times. Audio is our only method of passive ingestion for our content. Unlike with the text and video, which require undivided attention, you can listen to audio while you drive, cook, work or cut the grass.

Google ended its audio news experiment in October, but we know that is not the end of the road. Rest assured that Google, Apple and Amazon will find a way to serve you news audio in response to specific questions. Because we are the only newsroom covering a lot of the stories on our platforms, you can bet that Google, Apple and Amazon will want audio versions of what we do for their devices.

One problem with the Google experiment is that it involved a small percentage of the content we create, just five stories from the Wake Up and as many as nine in Today in Ohio, often with some crossover. Our challenge now is delivering audio versions of many more of our stories, and that brings me back to the human voice.

We could quickly generate audio versions of our content with computerized voices. The pronunciation would not be perfect, and the emphasis would regularly be misplaced, but people could get the news they want in an audio format. But would they?

This is where I use a woodworking analogy. I love to make things in wood, and my guru for at least 15 years has been author Chris Schwarz, who has done more to explore hand tool woodworking than anyone in history. I read everything he writes and always want more. His just released book on how anyone can make some terrific wooden chairs with just a few tools might be his best.

Some years ago, he wrote in a blog about how much he enjoys feeling the evidence of a woodworker hand in a piece, as opposed to the uniform, seemingly perfect surfaces of mass-produced furniture.

“I love the wave-like fore plane marks on the undersides of drawers, on backs and under tabletops. I like them more than a flawless tabletop,” he wrote. “When I sit in a handmade chair, I feel under the arms for the marks from a gouge or a chisel. When I find the mark of a person, I like the chair more.”

I feel the same way, and it’s not just a cheap excuse to leave flaws on things I make. It’s about knowing that a human’s hands touched the piece. It’s a connection to the maker. I feel the same way about the human voice. I want to hear the inflections, the accents and the points people emphasize. Voice is how humans always have connected.

So, if we want to deliver audio versions of our content for Alexa, Siri and Google home, does that mean reporters will have to record them, so that you hear real voices? That’s more work. They already report their stories, write them for our website (in multiple iterations as stories develop) take the photos that illustrate them, write the headlines and optimize their work so that search engines will find them.

And they would have to write what they record. Writing for audio is quite different than writing for the website or the newspaper. We learned much about that from our Google experiment.

We don’t have the answer to these questions yet, but we will soon need them. When Alexa, Siri and Google Home are ready to answer your questions about news updates, we need to be there. And if we want to make that human connection with the listener – if we want you to feel that chisel mark on the underside of the chair arm – we will need actual human voices to make the recordings.

Thanks for reading,