Receivers

JUST AS the telecommunications industry was composed of transmitters and receivers, the world of commerce also revolved once upon a time upon brands (transmitters) and consumers (receivers). But what if brands now must also be receivers and listen as well as they speak? What if commercial conversation is ever more even-handed, and customers armed with knowledge and competing choices demand to be heard as well as seen?

Conversational AI is the new platform on which this powerplay is played out, and the verbal dexterity of your bots may hold the keys to unique long-term relationships which open out into multiple businesses. Imagine an experience of media discovery which not only satisfied and delighted but connected and edutained for good measure. What if the brand’s role is now to listen to us and not only expect admiration and loyalty?

Audio interfaces are far more than a convenient upgrade on manual ones. Voice is a totally new space that replaces the mechanical divide with natural speech. When a person is speaking instead of typing, so much more information is available beyond the content. Instead of aiming to become the world’s most admired brand, future enterprises will aim to become the world’s most empathic ones, the best receivers.

Linguistics and sociolinguistics have revealed the intentions and motivations of human beings behind words and conversations. We do not merely speak to mean – we speak to relate and to communicate status. Our voice is an ultimate currency, spent diligently in consolidating our social capital and avoiding undesirable waste. Once upon a time we explored corporate voice as an expression of brand. Now we strive to identify and receive the voices of each particular client and consumer. 

Area 22 is that location in the brain responsible for language comprehension – what if your brand comprehended the speech of all? What if it received the intent behind the language? Millions of tiny opportunities where what a customer said revealed a larger context. Opportunities not only to serve and to satisfy but to remember and build on. Brands would learn far more every day at the frontline than any amount of market research. Value chains would adapt intuitively to the evolving conversation. Data-driven insights would be audible.

But for this to happen, voice technology must still evolve beyond instructions and transactions, and learn how to grasp inference and relations. Speech act theory as developed by John Austin teaches us that human sentences are really twofold – linguistic structures but also social utterances designed to achieve a goal. People are never simply talking about a topic – in essence they are inquiring, requesting, reminding, complaining, praising, coaxing, congratulating and fulfilling a host of other social functions. Receiver brands would learn this inner language of their clients and relate to it.

This is not a question of English and it is not a question of individual culture. Different languages and cultures have differing electrical voltages, but the purpose of each is identical. A brand is a problem-solving device, but brands that don’t physically listen to their customers are missing out on the other half of the equation – opportunity generation. 

A receiver brand has an area in their brain that comprehends what the conversation is all about, and that leverages that conversation for a thousand profitable learnings and cues. It harnesses politeness theory to avoid Face-Threatening Acts such as bald-on requests that risk direct imposition. It replaces grey representative speech acts with colourful expressive ones that empathize with their listeners. It knows the point of the brand is not the service or even the experience – but the conversation.

Just imagine for a moment the joy of discovering you are on to a robot in customer service, instead of our current contempt, dismay and despair. Instead of obeying the instruction to punch a required number, imagine being asked an organic question and being listened to. Receiver brands will steal a march on all transmitting ones because they know the non-negotiable asset is the customer’s attention. Facework is the linguistic model for negotiating social status, and receiver brands will master both positive (respect-boosting) and negative (pressure-removing) dimensions of facework.

So quite apart from all the mobile, smart home, ubiquitous connotations to conversational AI this is in essence a whole new ball game. Global fluency will consist in how many individual conversations a brand can have at any one time across its footprint. Empath brands will not only hear their customers – they will heed them. A long conversation that always seems too short, that is how someone once defined the happy marriage. Making long conversations seem too short because they are so great is the goal.

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.