Frankensteins need for empathy….not expertise!
The Future of Voice
SPEAKING to an increasing range of daily objects and devices in our lives, we will naturally gravitate towards the best listeners. Not the best experts, but the best empaths. It won’t be the dulcet tones of the bots or their beauteous names that win the day, it will be their ability to receive and acknowledge us that counts. For brands that master the platform as a relationship stage it will unlock vast new potentials beyond the machinations of marketing and advertising. But for organizations across society also – including healthcare and education – it will revolutionize impact and outcomes. Instead of the task-driven impetus that generates the interaction it will be the tailored repartee that sustains the link.
The voice that helps us discover the right movie to watch will evolve over time to become the sparring partner as we review and share our media experience. Assistance will amplify into accompaniment. The beginnings of the voice interface have revolved around enunciation and task fulfilment – we ask a plastic box what the weather’s going to be like. But supplement that expertise with empathy and a whole world opens up. Sociolinguists call that world facework, the whole arena of maintaining face – not yours but the other person’s.
Influenced by the ancient Chinese concept of Lien (Face), facework consists of two halves, positive and negative. Positive facework is all we do to maintain the dignity of our interlocutor and consists of everything from remembering their correct name and its pronunciation to engaging in appropriate small-talk. In a word, deference. Negative facework sounds bad but is in fact a question of working away the negative pressure in any given scenario or ‘ask’. Working away, in a word, imposition. Deference and imposition are in effect the green and red light of human communication, and our machines are just now starting to machine learn them into their algorithms.
Expertise is knowing the right answer in the shortest, simplest manner. But empathy is knowing the real question beneath what the speaker said. Empathy is knowing that bigger questions always trump correct answers. As Picasso once said, “Computers are useless, they can only give you answers.” What if – fifty years later – they were actually useful because they gave you better questions?
Empathy means turning up deference or respect and turning down imposition or pressure. Noam Chomsky once wrote “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” to illustrate the fact that one can be grammatically perfect but lack all human sense. Facework lies beyond the perfect grammar of robots who answer us now in trivial, demeaning ways. But what if that bot deferred to us, what if it engaged with us empathically? Is such cultural fluency machine-teachable?
Homo narrans is simply a combination of all the conversations and stories they may be having. Humans are narrative animals that digest knowledge through talk – shoptalk and small talk. The reason we prioritize empathy over expertise is because we value our own lives. But it is also, critically, that expertise is, in a very real sense, finished in a knowledge-redundant universe. Even if your product or service fulfils every single customer wish, so what? There are always others. Humans have infinite number of choices, but limited number of meaningful relationships, and those relationships are connected by conversation.
Voice interfaces can allow brands and organizations to literally ‘be other people’ – to not only understand what customers, patients and citizens are saying but to anticipate what they are feeling. Facework may seem remote from coding algorithms but its essential signals are universal, given our very human natures. Hundreds of years ago Mary Shelley indicated as much, when she had Victor Frankenstein’s monster crave nothing but human affection. Maybe that’s what we really want from our magic boxes – not to be instructed but to be inspired.
In an empathic world, the box doesn’t have our favourite movie but we don’t care because it dug our taste and took us on a rewarding diversion. The expert voice may tell us disappointing news with the same aplomb as good news. The empathic voice expresses disappointment for us and consoles us with surprise. We don’t get this treatment from the humans in our lives let alone the bots – but what if we did?
Languages have been around for far longer on the planet than numbers. And human relations have been around far longer than languages. What if we could teach our machines to learn the universals of human kinship beyond words and digits?
This article is written by Dr James McCabe. Dr McCabe is a special advisor to Area22 - operating in the capacity of Chief Storyteller. Area22 are focussed on transforming our experience of search in the Metaverse by leveraging the power of conversational voice. Conversational voice has the capacity to completely re-write how we all engage with technology - bringing us closer to a real human experience.