I asked the Echo in my kitchen to order dish soap last Thursday. It told me, pleasantly, that it had found a highly rated option, and would I like to add that to my cart. I said yes. Two days later a box arrived with a brand I have never bought, never considered, and could not have named under any amount of pressure.
Somewhere, a team spent eighteen months and a great deal of money building a voice for that dish soap. Warm. Approachable. A little wry, because everything is a little wry now. None of it made it into my kitchen. The only voice in the room was Alexa's.
Which is the entire problem, and almost nobody I talk to is treating it as one.
When an assistant becomes the interface, your brand voice stops being something a customer hears and starts being something a machine decides whether to mention.
I have been thinking about HAL 9000 more than is reasonable for someone whose job is packaged goods. The frightening thing about HAL was never volume. HAL is courteous the whole way through. The tone does not change between reading a chess move and declining to open the pod bay doors. The surface stays smooth and warm while the decision underneath it quietly stops being yours.
Alexa is not malevolent. It is a shopping funnel with excellent manners. But the shape is the same: an agreeable voice sitting on top of a choice made somewhere you cannot see, by criteria you were never shown. Amazon's Choice is a shelf position, and it is won on reviews, price, and fulfillment speed. Not on your tone of voice guidelines.
So what actually survives the trip through the speaker? Three things. One, a name that works out loud. If a customer cannot say it cleanly, or if it collides with a word the device hears more often, you are invisible in a way no rebrand fixes. Two, category specificity, because 'order paper towels' goes to the default and 'order Bounty' does not. Three, a reason to be named at all, which is the only real defense and also the oldest one.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, where voice is treated as the deliverable. It becomes a document about adjectives. It has never once been about whether a person would say the name out loud in an empty kitchen.
Alexa is not malevolent. It is a shopping funnel with excellent manners.
Truffles and Barnaby have solved this already. Barnaby will eat exactly one food and will starve theatrically in the presence of any other. So I do not ask for cat food. I ask for the brand, by name, every time, and no assistant has ever talked me out of it. That is the whole strategy. Everything else is adjectives.