‘The Voice’ Sounds Quite Important To Brands Thinking AI

AI is now the fact of life. Creating a voice that reflects your brand and builds a genuine emotional connection with your customers is more important than ever.

Artificial intelligence has well and truly arrived. A technology that just over 10 years ago provided the basis for an unnerving sci-fi film is now in our pockets and living rooms. And yet, this transition has been surprisingly quick. While brands spend time and effort optimising their customer experience on screens, it looks as though they could well be blindsided by “voice”—the thread that will likely hold together the tech of tomorrow.

The Importance Of Voice

Cast your mind back to the introduction of sat navs to market—an oft-parodied caricature of a stubborn American voice barking out directions is usually what springs to mind. Even with this early iteration of voice interaction, consumers had strong opinions about what they wanted to hear, and they made companies aware of it. The same is true of the dreaded call centre. In a bid to improve customer experience, many companies moved their centres to Scotland to capitalise on the finding that Scottish voices were more reassuring.

In a digital world where we interact with brands through an endless number of screens, there are progressively fewer human touch points between brands and consumers. In this landscape, voice becomes fundamental in creating a genuine and valuable emotional connection between brand and consumer.

Engineering A Distinct Voice

Given that voice has long been acknowledged as an important tool for driving positive customer engagement, some branding considerations will remain unchanged in the face of AI.

AI can, and should be, thought of as a distinct brand touch point. As a result, tone and lexicon should be at the forefront of any AI branding exercise. The tone will be informed by the manner in which you want your brand to communicate with your consumer—are you charming like Alexa or sassy like Siri? Lexicon goes hand in hand with tone, and brands should consider whether they want to communicate in the Queen’s English or if a more personable regional dialect suits them better.

In engineering a distinct voice for their AI, brands will have to revisit questions they’ve been asking themselves in various contexts for a long time, all the while bearing in mind that the voice they create may eventually do the talking for them without their careful oversight. On this point, always remember that an AI tool should act as an aid to an overall brand identity, not as a brand in itself. For lessons in what not to do, refer to Microsoft’s AI PR disaster Tay—as the bot developed Nazi sympathies alongside a love of kittens, it became decidedly off-message.

Physical Interface

Where AI changes the game for brands is by creating a point of intersection and, as a result, raising questions they haven’t had to address—until now. One such point is between the vocal branding of AI and the physical branding of the interface housing it. I find Amazon’s Alexa has quite a pleasant voice, but it doesn’t quite suit the Darth Vader meets Bang & Olufsen interface that it’s housed in.

Conquering the task of creating a voice which reflects your brand is almost pointless if it does not work in harmony with its physical surroundings. Consider the interface you would want to interact with in a bank, for example, in contrast with that in a hotel. In a bank, it is likely you would want to interact with an AI with design cues that indicate sturdiness and authority, whilst an AI in a hotel would ideally complement the ambience and help create a mood of relaxation. As a result, it would be incongruent for the same voice to emanate from both, giving brands added impetus to ensure that their vocal branding is fit for purpose and reinforces the physical branding around it.

Brand Integration

That being said, at CES this year we saw Amazon’s Alexa being integrated into everything from fridges to cars. The same voice, and therefore by implication the same Amazon brand, was integrated into Ford, LG, and Huawei products—among many others.

What impact could this extensive brand integration have on the companies that chose to embed Alexa into their own interfaces? The pessimistic marketer could see this integration as ceding brand control—allowing another voice to characterise your products and, therefore, muscling in on the connection with your consumer.

This is a narrow view, and one that fails to take into consideration the consumers’ needs. Consider, instead, who is best placed to be the “host” in any given scenario. In a plane, for instance, you would likely prefer your meal to be provided by The Ivy, as opposed to the carrier’s in-house chef. Whilst Michelin star may be wishful thinking, the concept has been put into practice. Just last year British Airways announced that they would be ditching free in-flight food for recognisable and reassuring fare from M&S.

Apply this to AI integration, and it suddenly becomes clear that, in a car, for example, the consumer’s preference may well be for German engineering and directions provided by Alexa. When you think about it in terms of who is “hosting” specific elements of the customer experience, it becomes clear that you are not ceding brand control at all—just responding intelligently to your customer’s preferences in a way that may even positively impact their perception of your own brand.

Evolving Personality

This question of who should host the consumer also applies to your AI on a more complex level. Brands should consider which “mode” of the AI’s personality is most appropriate for the individual demands its users may make. Mattel’s new AI for children, Aristotle, is an example of a brand that has already started to think in such terms.

The toy company has devised an AI that will, for all intents and purposes, act as a nanny for your child and currently has the voice of a young, energetic nursery teacher. Mattel says that the AI will be able to teach your child manners, by requiring them to say please before certain commands, as well as helping them with their homework. The company will need to consider which tone the AI should take for each specific task—friendly, authoritative, disciplinary—as it looks to develop Aristotle into less of a bot and more of a companion. In terms of gender, Mattel seems to have already decided that a female voice is better placed to act as a surrogate parent. This, too, is another crucial question that brands haven’t had to ask themselves until now—making a definitive choice about their brand’s gender identity.

Ultimately, the diverse needs of humans will have to be matched as accurately as possible by the diverse delivery of AI. The points above should act as initial questions for brands looking to tap into the rapid rise of AI, however, they are by no means an exhaustive list. As we experience the development of what is still an emerging technology, the possibilities from a branding perspective will only increase, bringing along with them even more questions for companies and consumers alike.