BeyondWords
An AI start-up asking a human-powered language studio to define its positioning and tone of voice. Who’d have thought it? Delighted to be asked, we prompted ourselves to do the best darn job we could. That meant bringing AI audio into the real world. Things got very personal.
Embracing possibility
Until recently, it’s been impossible for newsrooms to put their journalists’ voices to every article they write. Impossible. Too many words, too pressured a turnaround. So, what do you do? You could forget it. Leave the written word on the page or screen. But that's not enough these days.
We learned during our six-month project with AI start-up BeyondWords that there’s a shift towards people listening to news. Simply put, your writing reaches more people if you make it audio. Also, what about those people who are blind or visually impaired? Audio is everything to them.
That’s where BeyondWords comes in. It’s the brainchild of a powerhouse tech team, James MacLeod and Patrick O'Flaherty. They approached us with the product: a platform that converts text to speech using AI voices. And a challenge: how to bring the product to life through brand, enabling BeyondWords to partner with more newsrooms.
Spoiler alert: the verbal identity we developed helped BeyondWords win projects alongside News Corp Australia and ElevenLabs, pioneers in the AI audio space. How did we do it? We started with an observation.
Full story soon...