AI Best Practice: Speak with an Accent

I was speaking with Venu Moola the other day, and he told me a story related to AI that really gave me pause about marketing and your marketing. So I want to talk about that. Venu is the founder of Fleet Studio and Wally, which are in the business of online experience creation for their clients. And they’re developing a new AI technology that allows their clients to use an audio voice that is very natural sounding, and they’re able to have it say whatever they want it to say, even choose the accent. And they’re experimenting with four different English accents. Australian, Indian, British, American. And it’s coming along really well. And he decided to try and kind of test it out with his young son and had him listen to these four clips and asked him to tell him what accent he heard. And his son’s answer was something to the effect, well, they all have an AI accent. Which there’s two things from that I want to talk about. 

One, the first, you know, we’re pretty dazzled with AI. So you wanna be careful because humans have more perception than sometimes you give us credit for. And you wanna be really careful not to lose your trust of your prospects and your clients by pretending to be real when they can tell that you’re not. But the bigger takeaway from the story is that at the rapid pace that AI is changing today, it’s just a matter of time. Some months, maybe a year or two before none of us will be able to tell whether what we’re watching or seeing online is real. And that’s a problem for you and your marketing because of the syndrome effect.

The Syndrome Effect
The syndrome effect named after the Pixar character in the Incredibles, the evil genius who wants to give everybody in the world superpowers. Because if everybody’s special, then nobody is. That is what AI is bringing to your marketing communications. As we all gain scale and quality in our written and video and, and photo content, it’s gonna become a flood of high quality, realistic information for consumers that can’t consume anymore than they are today. So they’re gonna have to choose more selectively who they pay attention to, what they listen to, what they absorb. And that’s a problem for all of us because today’s current marketing is designed based on finding a way to cut through the noise and reach out to the prospects and clients that you need to engage with, right?

So I wanna suggest three things for you to do with your AI adoption in your business now to help address that, that coming storm.

Automate Education
First, you want to apply AI everywhere in your organization that it’s an advantage for you that’s not directly related to how you engage with your clients. So there’s all kinds of productivity we know about in AI for you know, for Microsoft Office, for the Google platform, a bunch of different ways. Chat GPT. Go for that. Adopt, get more efficient. You need to do that to be competitive. You can do that with your communications too, for your education communications. So that’s the kind of content and communications you have that relate to teaching your prospects new things or solving a problem for them, helping them, right? That kind of information. Anything you can do to make that easier for them to absorb and learn, you’re addressing a growing problem for them because again, they have a flood. And anything you can do to make it easier for them to learn that’s, that’s a good thing.

Invest in Engagement
Where you wanna be careful with that is in your engagement communications. So yes, information’s important, but what gets you a sale at the end of the day is the commitment that comes from the trust that comes from a relationship that you establish with your prospects. And that trust comes from having real conversations, right? So with AI now, there’s gonna be such a flood of, I’ll call it impostor content, that it’ll be really hard to stand out. So you need to start thinking now about how you will communicate with your clients and have them know that they are talking to you or communicating with you authentically. No, we can’t all just get in a room together, but that’s one way to know, and I don’t have the answers, but it’s something that every business really needs to start thinking about.

Essentially what I’m saying is you need to understand what your accent is and keep your accent. Have your truth, your authenticity come through in your communications with your clients. Even as the AI storm totally changes the way we communicate. The companies that find a way to stand out authentically and, and realistically, naturally are the ones that are gonna have the advantage.