After a decade of brands being tried and tested by social media, another new medium is set to challenge brand integrity: AI-powered voice technology. This new voice-controlled world will not only test brand differentiation, but also how enduring a brand's relationship is with its consumers. Tone of voice has long been an essential component of a brand development, helping marketers embody and express the personality of their brand, largely via the written word. Before the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other social media this was a straightforward exercise, developing a brand's tone of voice safe in the knowledge that all text written for advertisements, marketing collateral, website content, or for press use, would be carefully reviewed, checked and approved against those guidelines. Smart brands have since extended their brand identity guidelines to help them manage how they communicate via social media, where brand communications can be free-flowing conversations that are not planned in advance, regulated by the letter and can be disrupted by consumers.

Development is fundamentally about understanding people, their motivations, behaviors and reactions. We have two primary means of understanding people — observing what they do, and what they say. As the AI4D community has noted, people's increased use of mobile devices has led to a wealth of new data relevant to these topics. We are on the cusp of developing incredibly powerful tools that can help us understand how human beings migrate, transact and acquire wealth. This could have a large impact on how we determine policies and allocate resources. Most of this analysis has tended to focus on what people do — where they go, who they talk to, what they buy, etc. I argue that what people say is an equally rich source of development data, often containing information that cannot be obtained from people's actions, such as their needs, hopes and aspirations. Voice is the most natural form of communication, especially for people who speak a non-mainstream language, and/or have marginal literacy skills.  These are often exactly those populations who are most disenfranchised, and therefore most need their voices to be heard.