How to Converse:The Future of Voice

The world, as someone said, is not made of atoms but of stories. Most of those stories are not written but spoken, and indeed many of them are unspoken. As the metaverse becomes the storyworld for the economy (if not yet society), let’s consider the role of conversation (literally living with others) in that universum. Conversations in the metaverse take place between humans and humans, humans and their machines, and also between machines themselves. Let’s consider that middle variant.

Far more things are happening in any conversation than simply its topic. Conversations are not what they mean – they are also who says them, when they are performed, in what sequence, in what frequency and so on. Conversations are exchanges of language in its various forms – what we call turns – and they follow engrained cultural patterns. Some cultures never interrupt each other, some cultures perceive interruption as interaction. Conversational phenomena range over a wide area from small talk, code switching (between dialects or languages), social rescue, storytelling, persuasive or coercive rhetoric etc.

What do we expect from a machine conversation? Not mechanized language.

The human expects not to adapt to the machine, but that the machine adapts to their own conversational norms. Simply giving the bot an attractive female name is touching but hardly convincing (and indeed, one wonders about the embedded gender stereotyping that led to such Silicon Valleyisms). We want expertise from the machine – but we want empathy more. We do not want to be lectured – we want a pal. Machines have already been living with us for some time and are already mimicking some of the servant/pet roles long embedded in our civilization.

The way forward for intuitive voice interfaces and verbal assistants is conversational. For bots to cease to be servile (robot is Czech for slave), but for them never to become ‘masterful’. Living with others through conversation implies an equivalence of discourse. Consider, for example, how absent the entire area of small talk remains among machine interaction. Small talk is really big talk, and in many cultures it dominates the shoptalk. The essence of small talk is curiosity (not ‘nosiness’). How many machines currently take the slightest interest in our existence? They could learn to – or be taught.

Conversational phenomena involve small talk, turn taking and social repair. They are not only self-correcting, they acquire backstory and establish relationships. If all of the omnichannel data analytics of contemporary commerce could be replaced with natural flowing conversation, what a world of difference that would make. Without the endless moronic explanations. Without the eternal frustrations of being misunderstood. With all of the immediate comeback of real conversation. Empathic, not necessarily expert. How many complaints, for example, are not seeking redress but merely reception and acknowledgment? 

The metaverse is the metaphysics of contemporary life, the idea of things complementing if not replacing their physical fact. And the central idea of a brand or any organization is the conversation it is having with everyone. How many of those conversations are currently one-directional, transactional, paper thin, utilitarian, end-stopped, repetitive, anonymous or otherwise frustrating?

Designing the next generation of digital conversation is a multi-layered challenge blending software coding with the ancestral human codes of conversation which have grown up over millennia. English alone in its lifespan is over fifteen hundred years old in all its incarnations, others are older still. Conversations have sophisticated rhetorical functions that get things done (expertise) but more importantly they have narrative functions that bond human units together (empathy). When the narrative is given equal or greater relevance in machine discourse, the metaverse will become a more hospitable, inhabitable place.

Area 22 is a zone in the brain responsible for language comprehension. To date it’s been kind of missing in the digital brain of the voice assistants. They can pick out our words but struggle to make out who we are, why we are conversing or what our ultimate motivations may be. Imagine if it were otherwise in future. Imagine if that artificial voice remembered who you were, connected with you as an individual, rescued you from confusion, told you a funny anecdote, demonstrated kinship – a conversational metaverse, not a coldly expert one.

Two monologues do not make a conversation – you need the superglue of oxytocin or human empathy.

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.