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As messaging platforms continue to widen their lead in monthly active users over social networks, conversational interfaces will become the primary interface between brands and consumers. This shift from graphic-led to conversational-led introduces new interaction models that require brands to rethink how they connect with consumers.
There have been many best practice guides on how to design the right conversational experiences, but most, if not all, have forgotten a key element: Sound. Sound provides the experiential component that can add emotion to any experience without interfering with its functionality or utility. The key is to understand the right sounds to use and where to use them.
There is a broad universe of sounds including music, environmental sounds, and short sound effects that are capable of creating strong linkages between brand identity, emotion, and memory. The sound of a voice can only go so far to distinguish a specific product or service.
Users increasingly expect the function of an API to be reflected in the sounds the user actually hears. There is an increasing number of sound effect-related skills available to Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem, including dog-barking, air horns, and haunted house sounds. These skills engage Alexa as an advanced audio tool to enrich real-world play situations, providing a useful case study to brands on the kinds of auditory diversity being sought after and employed by early adopters.
Consider a smart-home API that uses weather sounds to signal a coming rainstorm, or a ride-hailing service that plays the characteristic tire whurr of a hybrid vehicle to signal that the driver is approaching. In both cases, sound forms a high-powered link that simultaneously promotes user efficiency while delivering an invaluable emotional component to the AI user interface.
Human-level conversation for an AI is very difficult to achieve, though it is baked into what users expect: AI systems are often anthropomorphized with names like Siri and Alexa…
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