Market-Driven Voice Profiling: A Framework for Understanding

This article creates a framework for understanding the philosophical and social implications of an emerging marketing driven business that “robs” people of autonomy over their voice. The focus is on the “voice intelligence industry” whose goal is to analyze people’s voices to draw conclusions about their emotions and personalities and, long-term, and to use biometric features that leak from “voice” as the basis for target marketing and influence. These new practices, in effect, turn voice against itself by inferring from a person’s sounds and syntax feelings, ideas, or beliefs that have perhaps not actually been expressed, and which that person might not want to acknowledge. We use the concepts of quaternary relationships, seductive surveillance, and habituation to explain how this new industry’s influence and power emerged and, on that basis, argue that its outcome is to disrupt the very basis on which voice might be valued in social and democratic life.