It’s all getting very emotional
Until recently, AI often felt distinctly robotic—smart enough, sure, but clearly missing the human touch. That’s changing fast.
Until recently, AI often felt distinctly robotic—smart enough, sure, but clearly missing the human touch. That’s changing fast. Now, AI tools aren’t just getting smarter and friendlier, warmer, and even surprisingly empathetic. It’s becoming easier than ever for marketing, sales, and customer success teams to use AI for genuine connections, even at massive scale.
Look at just the past week: we’ve heard AI voices so lifelike they’re giving listeners chills, and we’ve seen chatbots that respond with nuance and genuine empathy, sounding more like thoughtful colleagues than automated scripts. Even Alexa is stepping up its emotional game, shifting from a basic assistant to something closer to a personal concierge who remembers your preferences and anticipates your next move.
As AI keeps dialing up emotional intelligence, interactions that once felt forced or fake now feel authentic. For marketers and customer-focused teams, that means new possibilities to engage meaningfully, naturally, and comfortably with customers without the robotic awkwardness.
Let’s get into the details.
AI Voice Tech Breakthroughs – Human-Like Voices at Scale
This week saw leaps in AI-generated speech, narrowing the gap between human and synthetic voices. We’ve seen (or, rather, heard) two new models forming a trend: they use a Large Language Model backbone to imbue voices with realistic emotion and context.
First came Hume AI’s Octave, an AI text-to-speech model that creates lifelike voices with rich emotions. Octave can generate custom voices and personalities from brief prompts, mimicking accents, tones, and styles (e.g. “gentle therapist” voice). A blind test found Octave’s audio more natural and high-quality than ElevenLabs’ output, with listeners preferring Octave’s voice in ~72% of trials.
For a few days, it felt Octave pulled ahead in the race… but then Sesame demonstrated a new Conversational Speech Model so lifelike that it “freaked out” tech journalists. Testers said chatting with Sesame’s AI felt like talking to a real person – one reporter was unnerved when the AI’s voice reminded him of an old friend.
Sesame (founded by Oculus’s co-founder) trained its model on 1 million hours of speech audio, focusing on emotional intelligence and consistent personality in responses. It even rolled out two demo personas, “Maya” and “Miles,” to show off natural back-and-forth conversation.
Why it matters:
We’re entering an era of AI voices that can carry a conversation.
For customer success and sales, this opens the door to truly conversational IVRs and virtual agents – imagine a support hotline where an AI voice calmly walks an upset customer through a solution, and the customer never realizes it’s not human. Early adopters in call centers are already eyeing such tech to enhance service (Sesame’s realism was praised as “insane” by the CEO of Shopify).
Marketers can also leverage emotive AI voices for interactive ads, voice-overs, or personalized audio messages at scale. The caveat is ensuring customers are comfortable – the “uncanny valley” of voices is real. Brands will need to deploy these voices thoughtfully, with transparency and an ear on user reactions, to tap their potential without creeping people out.
