Different tones of voice on a website have measurable impacts on users’ perceptions of a brand’s friendliness, trustworthiness, and desirability. Casual, conversational, and enthusiastic tones performed best.

The Web and the advance of its Voice commands, the way of the future on how we will interact with our favourite e-shops, as we do now with GIS and maps, and will open the gate of the aural development as a fine art.

Visitors of Segonquart Studio may have noticed a charm welcome voice kindly ported from Susan.  in She is better known to be the voice of Siri. It was not me the company that borrowed her without a contract. And if I would need her delicate voice I will pay the correspondent check

It was a silly joke to use a soft lady voice when I was playing around with the famous text-to-speech technology, and it is a first step in what I call an unfinished UI template, as a symphony,  for the neverlasting Segonquart Studio's website. Because of Segonquart to me is like a lady, even being an Studio. We do not treat bad girly corporations neither companies like being undressed gentlemen, don't we?

As much as visitors become partners or active members in a website, the use of voice as a medium of transmission  ( of data, about information, about questions ) becomes a heavy pillar  in the conception and development of any kind of interface to be used by us, humans.

This is not a referral to virtual reality but to reality itself. I want my website to interact with my visitor and my visitor to interact heavily with my website.

Like in a physical space, design flavours oral communication, but a website is not a flyer, neither a presentation card. For these aspects, to flavoutr the use of sound, there are the Aural sheets, the most unknown and misused property of the CSS specification. We talk about web design, but it's not visual design.

Years ago, we had music in the websites. It was like being inside an elevator. Floor 34th. good Morning. That was the thing in the Flash websites. Sound. Even Geocities, until 2009, was like a music boulevard. Every single website was flourished with a ding-a-long tune. Unnecessary in most cases, being honest.

Thus, the spread and worldwide embrace of MySpace dot com, A prime social network your dad knew very well and used often. Musicians and places and people who attended to concerts. A social network. You at the same level like Madonna or your favourite indie band. Remember: Billy Bragg had a MySpace page.

We had the music, we had the disco sound, but that was not interaction. Not the web. No real data. No feelings. Not a mean to communicate. Not because of the web, but because of the lack of voice. And we all know that Ominous Background Music Is Bad for Sharks

As web content professionals, we know that how we communicate with our users is just as important as what we’re communicating. Agreed.


A short essay inspired by The Impact of Tone of Voice on Users by Kate , who's at Nielsen Group.