How to give voice to your artificial intelligence?
In a near future will be strange not to think that people will be talking to their cars, home appliances or even having a new purchase experience. As a brand, what will you answer back to your costumers?
With a prediction of a U$ 127 billion market by 2024, the voice technology impact is starting to make its way into costumers life – offering new kinds of interaction, opportunities of engagement, more personal and closer connection. Moving on from podcasts, the next generation of audio interaction between people and brands will be focused on the artificial intelligence and on “internet of things” growth.
Amazon, Apple and Google already have their own voice, they fill their customers daily life, all over the world, providing all kinds of interaction with information updates or as an assistant, making customers life easier. The market for these AI assistants will continue to grow. It is a scenario developing and evolving quickly as people use more and more this technology. Although, the idea is that the AI computers adapt to people and not the other way around, we are at a point where the users must learn commands and functions to enable the interaction to get more natural, helping the technology to develop.
Nowadays, the voice is more important than ever, because there are so much more potential points of personal involvement. For example, think about the audio interaction happening through the connection of our home appliances and our home, the brand managers must seize this opportunity fully. In other hand, they must be careful and understand that there is a natural humanization process happening from the brands towards the different agents that surround them. Naturally, this process reflects on the vocal pattern of the robot’s new generation which is being produced and end up representing the brand in different points of contact with the customer. The AI assistant’s personality is becoming as important as their functions. The AI developers are exploring this relation when they bring personality traces to products and this interaction stimulates the loyalty from customers. Is not by chance that one of the first points that we discovered in our AI VOICE project is the understand of the brand’s essence. From this understanding, we draw, in a collaborative way, the persona that the voice would represent, appointing intrinsic characteristics that would give a unique tone to it.
We find very interesting to notice, how different groups of people with different backgrounds and profiles, connect emotionally almost immediately to certain vocal patterns. The main point here is to know how to translate this context. In our Sound Thinking approach we called this stage Brand’s Vocal Psychodynamic, there are characteristics that must be present on this construction.
When the focus is to humanize brands, we need to understand the different situations and customers that the voice will be interacting with, and from there, compose the vocal pattern in a real way, not synthesised. In order to be different from other brands in terms of personality, is key to have a unique voice, this will bring benefits to any brand willing to build its own sound code. A research made in 2017 by Invoca in the USA, discovered that 73% of the people who use these voice assistants made at least one purchase directly through their device, furthermore, 39% said that an interaction with the voice assistant has influenced the purchase decision on the past month. Lastly, nearly one in four people who use devices with voice assistance, are calling more frequently these companies, creating new opportunities through sound. Is clear that agencies and brands will need to adapt and be aware of this new world activated by voice. The clever use of sound, aimed to different agents’ interactions, has a great potential to give life to brands in a distinct, unique and involving way.
When still in the womb, the fetus respond to the mother’s voice – the cardiac rhythm is affected by the voice tone. Even before the technology and media transform the sound into a mass experience, the voice, naturally carried out an important role in our life’s development. It is something that defines our experiences even before we are born. The natural social individual interactions with computers, televisions and new medias are not new. The big advantage will be, to be unique and different in a stir of voices, human or not, that will seek to connect with customers, wherever they are.
