RBS student-turned CEO Heath Ahrens iSpeech Q&A

Dec. 8, 2011 - PRLog -- Why did you choose to attend Rutgers over other business schools?

I was looking for an in-state business school and Rutgers had a fine reputation for being the best in New Jersey. I was employed at the time so I had a work schedule and a class schedule.  However, Rutgers was pretty flexible and there were many classes I could take at convenient hours which made my life easier.


What were the most important gains you made there?

Rutgers was run more like a business than a school. The professors were very impressive and accessible.  I was able to develop relationships with them to seek advice about trying to start my own business while still studying.  I found I was getting professional advice from faculty members who had worked internationally, some in mergers and acquisitions, and others from big impressive companies.  They inspired me and gave me a vision of what it might be like to actually create a business.


How did you chart a specific career path?

Heath AhrensI had a ton of reading to do in my classes and it was often very difficult to keep up.  I was working and commuting and doing a lot of my studies sitting in traffic.  That’s how I got the idea for my company.  I knew about text-to-speech technology and that it was possible to turn text into audio that I could listen to on an iPod while I drove, cutting out at least two hours of study time during my daily commute.  I found the best speech technology that existed at the time but it wasn’t a user-friendly experience to say the least.  It had an annoying robotic sound to it.  However, I thought wouldn’t it be great if, rather than students downloading and printing the document they had to read, they could listen to it instead.  This would speed up the learning process a lot and that really sparked the idea for my company, iSpeech.

I took a Real Estate Economics course and had to read a slew of material for the class. Of course, I listened to lengthy papers in audio form. Rutgers have all their documents available online, PDF files already in electronic format so I was able to upload them into the first iSpeech server that we built and come out with audio files so it was basically input text
and output to a CD or iPod, MP3.

When it came time to take the test, I did very well and later the professor said to me, “I don’t understand how you could’ve quoted this or that guy so readily.”  

I told the class that I’d been converting all the course material to audio and the next thing I know people were asking me “Can I get that?”  I realized then that transforming text to audio in real time could be commercially successful.  When I could create a technology that could do in ten seconds exactly what the human voice does, then suddenly I had a viable business.


Would you say that your innovations have refined the technology in many ways?

That would be a bold claim but I can say that, thus far, we’ve brought speech technology to over 15 million people who have used our mobile apps.  I created the idea of iSpeech while still in school. Talk about a real education!  I had the best professors around helping me write a business plan for how I was going to start my own business the day I stepped out the door of Rutgers.


How do you grow your business in such a spectacular way?

We had the right application at the right time. The “Drive Safely” application was created because so many people were concerned about the dangers of distracted drivers and there was a need for potential solutions. We came out with an application that would allow people to hear their messages read to them while driving and they could respond by voice without having to look at their cell phones.


What makes your firm different from those of your competitors?

We differentiate ourselves by innovating and by changing the game, by bringing new ideas to market.  Instead of going after our biggest competitor’s customers who are well entrenched and (with whom they) have great relationships, we open up new markets. This technology has existed for a long time. It’s been used in Call Centers since the 80s.  However, rather than go after accounts with major airlines and other big companies, we create our own mobile apps and we open up our platform to anyone who wants to put speech-to-text on their cell phones. We also successfully compete by coming up with a free offering for something our competitors put a big price tag on.


What exactly is your free offering?

We have several apps out there that are free for consumers. Our most popular is “Drive Safely” which reads your messages and allows you to respond by voice.  It’s a “freemium” model. You can listen to your messages for free but if you want to respond by voice, you can upgrade to the pro version for $13.95.  So, it’s not a very expensive app for the people who are power users but folks are able to use it for free if they just want to test it out. Then there’s a translator app, the “iSpeech Translator” which is our free speech-to-speech utility. This means you can speak in Spanish and it comes out in English or vice versa.  I don’t know the exact number but most major languages are now supported by this program.


What do you think is the best career preparation that a business school can offer its students?

I think the best professors who really make an impact are the ones who teach you how to relate your knowledge of the curriculum to real life situations.  The second best preparation is experience and I recommend a really good internship at your dream company. I’m a big start-up proponent and I’d say to all of the students who are looking for a Fortune 500 firm, do some time at a start-up.  It will give you a first-hand look at how innovation works and most likely it will be a place where you’re not just a number but where your ideas are taken seriously.


How do you decide the best direction for your company in an industry where you really need to stay ahead of the curve?

I tend to make things that are not currently available become a reality, for instance, the speech-to-speech translator.  We know that, somewhere down the line, there’s going to be interactive, talking billboards or a refrigerator that tells you how many eggs you have left.  So those are some of the technologies we’re working on for the future.  We want to be the company that powers those innovations through our efforts along with our various partners.

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Rutgers Business School delivers people with business, science, and technology credentials to drive local, national, and global markets. More than 4,500 undergraduate and graduate students in New Jersey, China, and Singapore go to Rutgers Business School.