Luke Budka, AI Director at Definition, explains why Tone of Voice is absolutely critical
Luke Budka was one of the first executives in the Public Relations industry to adopt the job title, "AI Director".
I sat down and recorded a fascinating episode with him about how his company Definition is implementing Conversational AI for the whole company – and how they're using a combination of advanced internally built systems, married to third-party services, to develop industry-leading capabilities. I'll write more on the full interview in another post. In this one, I want to zero in specifically on Luke's advice on tone of voice for Conversational AI.
This is an issue that I know many vendors and practitioners are looking at, but I think it's also fair to say that many are simply focused on the issue of accuracy above all else.
As a team of individuals obsessed over the correct tone and use of language, you'd expect Luke and colleagues to have opinions on this topic.
Have a read of the transcript from Luke's interview and see how he describes and addresses the issue of tone of voice (I've edited lightly for readability):
Luke Budka: We have a language team at Definition that is full of experts. We've got behavioural psychologists, we've got linguists, we've got some of the best language professionals in the country in the team. And as such, we do a lot of training with big companies around the world and we do a lot of tone of voice work. Now I think there's a big difference when it comes to setting up a chatbot and setting up a chatbot that speaks and talks in your tone of voice.
The tone of voice has, for example, been shown empirically to reduce churn rate in customers or to reduce the amount of calls your customer service desk gets. Some of our language experts did some work for HSBC, for example, where they helped to rewrite their customer help guides. It reduced calls to their customer service help desk by X amount, which reduced their expenditure on it by six figures.
It really can make a massive difference if you change your sentences from passive to active. Your verbiage, your sentence length, and your adjective use can make a palpable difference.
Are you thinking about your Conversational AI's Tone of Voice?
Have you asked your communications teams – and your PR company – to weigh in on this?
If you're looking for an agency that can help you address this, have a chat with Luke! You can reach him directly via his LinkedIn profile.
Watch out for more updates from Luke's interview shortly.
