From Curation to Conversation - The Future of Voice

Perhaps the most suasive scenario in conversational AI is media curation, where seconds to content is the Key Performance Indicator and media incumbents have everything to play for as Big Tech players invade the voice interface. For a start, Seconds to Content is not the only KPI, with outcomes requiring other features than speed to survive. Like Conviviality to Content – how convivial was your artificially intelligent voice? In other words, literally how could your customer put up with it? Conversation and conviviality both stem from Latin, living with. As your bots live with your clientele to fend off Big Vocal Interfaces, how friendly and socially successful are they being?

Area 22 has put a lot of thought and application into precisely this space, and we’ve studied the nature of man-machine conversation as it approaches human-to-human interaction. While a fully human conversation is never comparable, there are aspects of humanitas the bots can learn and digest. Like back-channelling, the active listening humans provide their interlocutors as a matter of course. Like conversational repair and social rescue, where humans take on the burden of error or embarrassment themselves rather than leave their conversational partners with it. The universals of human interaction do not need to be mega-crunched in Big Data – they are very simple and consist of expressing respect and removing pressure. Showing deference, to use the scientific term, and withdrawing imposition.

When one of your customers interacts with your media library, this little set of conversational turns is a client journey in miniature that mimics and shapes their entire relationship with your brand. Speed to content satisfies your client, but it is not the only thing that is going on. This little interaction is a footstep in lifetime loyalty and influences all future recommendations they may make to others. Twenty years of recorded robots have no doubt saved countless brands millions of dollars – but perhaps they have also endangered billions over the course of all customers’ lifetimes. We want the bots to be more efficient than the humans – but at least as respectful, as engaged and as enthusiastic. Humanizing them takes applied sociolinguistics.

“Welcome. What do you feel like watching tonight? Push that mic button and tell me what you’re thinking.”

Help me out would you?

“Not sure? So, what are you in the mood for? Once I know that it'll help me find content.”

Something fresh

Got it, New it is. Conducting mood check. My first question, are you closer to something Chilling or Light-hearted?

I'd say Chilling.

Alright. Chilling wins round one. Now, shall I start with the Chilling or Atmospheric titles?

Let's go for Atmospheric first.

Atmospheric, perfect. JFK REVISITED: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS is an interesting one. Oliver Stone examines the circumstances surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  Ask me to tell you more and I'll read the plot.

Play It. 

The voice here is doing more than solving the customer’s paradox of choice. It is doing more than curating. It is navigating an interaction, remembering a relationship, anticipating a future. Soon the voice will understand far more than what is being said. It will remember and anticipate far more, it will contextualize each future interaction. Evolving from curation to conversation, it will transform interaction into relationship. Speed to Content – not exactly the only thing we measure in human relationships, is it?

Vocal interfaces thus offer, even in their current nascent forms, far more than just convenience and speed over manual ones. They verbalize brands and separate the caring from the couldn’t-care-less objects which surround our everyday lives. Not every object needs a human voice, to be sure, but those which have them stand to develop much longer lives and much deeper relationships with their owners. Today, media curation. Tomorrow, self-healthcare, education, immersive retail experiences. Things that speak will rise about their dumb counterparts and repel attempts to spirit them away with someone else’s interface.

So, an ephemeral task such as selecting what to watch to while away an hour or two can become an essential purpose to educate, heal or help other human beings. Human voices have been doing all of these things for millennia, and languages encode dozens of enabling tricks. Perhaps the first ingredient in all happy customer relationships is curiosity – the brand has to care. Humility is key. Brands don’t save humanity. Humanity saves itself, sometimes utilizing brands. And of course, the object is not to consume your media library by the mile. The goal is to share real human emotions with new audiences that grow communities and tribes. Between attention and memory exists the entire economy. Conversations are what extends that space. And things that know how to converse have a natural headstart on those that don’t.

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.