Quick thanks to everyone who took the survey yesterday. It’s very helpful. So far as I write this (3 p.m. ET Wednesday) we have a total of just under 600 replies. I’ll share some of the data next week; if you missed it yesterday and would like to help me out, please just click below.
Shark Tank and Plato
This is a story about Plato, Shark Tank, and AI. Let’s do the Shark Tank part first.
A new study out of the University of Cincinnati, Georgia Tech, and the University of Michigan asked a strange question: Does your voice sound more persuasive if it sounds like the person you’re talking to?
Shark Tank
The researchers were specifically interested in timbre — the texture and color of a voice, the quality that makes one person’s “hello” sound different from another’s even when both hit the same pitch, tone, and volume.
Led by Kimberly Hyun, the researchers used machine learning to measure timbre objectively, then tested it against 7,002 entrepreneur-investor pairings from 14 seasons of Shark Tank.
The pattern held.
Entrepreneurs whose voices were closer in timbre to a given shark’s voice were more likely to land a deal with that shark, regardless of the pitch itself, the product, or the entrepreneur’s actual vocal pitch or gender.
They ran the same test on 2,091 Kickstarter campaigns, comparing each narrator’s voice to the average voice of the whole donor pool.
Campaigns whose narrator sounded closer to that average voice raised more money and hit their goals more often, though the effect shrank when a campaign already carried an outside credibility signal, like a “staff pick” badge.
Then came four controlled lab experiments — radio ads, restaurant picks, headphones, a sparkling drink — and the result kept repeating.
People trust voices that resemble their own, perceiving them as more competent. That trust then translates into more persuasion.
Artificial Intelligence
Now for the AI. Because as interesting as this is, what are we going to do — change our vocal timbre to match hundreds or thousands of individual consumers, one conversation at a time?
In fact, the study authors say, Yes, we probably are going to do that. We’re just going to use AI to make it happen—meaning real-time AI adaptation of a salesperson’s or AI agent’s voice, reshaped on the fly to match an individual listener’s timbre.
“As voice technology and cloning technology gets more advanced and accessible,” Hyun said, “it’s so much easier to just create an AI salesperson’s voice that’s similar to your voice.”
The JMR paper itself raises the call center scenario directly as the obvious next move once the technology catches up to the finding.
Honestly, I think the technology has already caught up. Voice cloning tools now need less than ten seconds of audio to produce a convincing copy.
Plato
All of which brings us back to Plato.
In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates worry about something that sounds almost quaint today: that if you teach rhetoric and persuasion as a set of techniques, you separate speech from truth.
The most persuasive argument wins, not the most useful one. A clever speaker can learn exactly how to produce agreement in a listener without ever caring whether that agreement points toward wisdom, justice, or anything real.
Socrates wasn’t worried about voices, but the mechanism he was describing and the mechanism this study measured are similar.
A skilled rhetorician finds the shape of persuasion that fits a particular listener and pours the message into it.
An AI system doing real-time voice matching is doing the identical thing, just one layer beneath the words, at the level of the sound itself—and doing it automatically, instantly, for every listener at once.
Plato thought the danger was a talented individual who’d mastered a craft. What he couldn’t have anticipated is a machine that mass-produces that exact craft, sanded down to a repeatable technical process, deployed simultaneously across every customer service line in the country.
Study the Greeks, my friends. And maybe watch Shark Tank. But above all pay attention to timbre — and how AI might be changing it.
Other things worth knowing …
NY Post: The number of adults who are “not in the labor force” (NILF) surged to an all-time high in June to 105.8 million. “We’ve got a big problem…with the flight from work of prime-age men,” said labor economist Nicholas Eberstadt at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
WSJ: Gen Z Looks for a Cheap Date: Date night in America now costs an average $189. Young, broke romantics go for picnics in the park, conversation over coffee. (Quick aside: Sometimes it’s pure coincidence that I choose two items that could theoretically be related, like this one and the on above.)
NY Times: The Trump administration planned to announce Wednesday that it has reached a broad nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the country enriching its own fuel for nuclear reactors. The accord is intended to further bind the United States with the Saudi government as the war with Iran strains the relationship.
Axios: The U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295 — a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years.
CBS News: France has become the first country in the European Union to ban social media for children under the age of 15. The law will also ban students from having phones in high schools.
Business Insider: Phone calls on flights could soon be banned. Former flight attendants say it’s about more than manners.
BBC: South Korean prosecutors sought a one-year jail term for the owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant accused of using ants as a dessert garnish. The owner admitted to serving ants but argued that they were used in a “small part” of the restaurant’s 15-course menu – as a topping for sorbets – and that diners were told they could opt for non-ant toppings.
Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. Photo by Andy Bodemer on Unsplash. That’s actually Socrates, not Plato, but it’s as close as I could find in the free-to-use archive. See you in the comments.