Most of us wish we could easily recreate our ideal tone of voice, quickly. But it’s a challenge.
That’s why I’ve been working with some artificial intelligence programmers lately to develop The Ventriloquist App.
You put in 250 words of your ideal tone of voice, and the app uses IBM’s Watson AI engine to analyze the tone and vocabulary. Then, anyone can plug their text into The Ventriloquist App and it’ll make hard suggestions about how to bring it up to scratch.
Cool, huh?
It’s a service I’m looking to offer my clients starting in the fall for deliverables where it makes more sense for them to draft the copy themselves than to pay a writer to do it. Think of social media posts, newsletter copy and even shorter reports. Right down to emails and Slack messages.
Tone of voice can do a great deal to foster an organization’s culture, and I’m excited about the potential of The Ventriloquist App. Meantime, if you know of anyone who might be interested to pilot it, please do let me know!
Yes. I’ve seen The Terminator. But I also believe robots can do a lot of good for many us! In the meantime, I’m also proud of my human ability to pick up on a client’s tone of voice and replicate it quickly. It’s one of the reasons I like to build a resting period into the writing process, so that a client can sit with a piece and figure out where the tone is off. The ideal, after a few months of working together, is for us to think and write in sync so that your communications all sound like you wrote them. Even if I did.
Here’s to the art of ventriloquism. Even if it might seem a little…creepy…at first.
