In this episode of AW360, we sit down with Verena Papik, Chief Emotion Officer of Talkalytics, to explore how voice is transforming the way brands understand their audiences. Verena—whose career spans from Musical.ly and TikTok to launching a voice-first insights platform—shares why the human voice is the most revealing emotional signal, why “social asking” matters more than “social listening,” and how emotionally intelligent AI is reshaping marketing strategy.
From stories about her Alpine roots to real-world brand case studies, Verena explains how Talkalytics captures raw, unguarded feedback and turns it into insights that drive trust, loyalty, and growth. Plus, she looks ahead to a future where adaptive narratives, emotional dashboards, and real-time sentiment will redefine the customer experience.
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Verena, welcome to the AW360 podcast. I’m very excited to have you today as this took a little bit to get going. So I am actually speechless, which doesn’t happen very often, but I’m very happy to be here. Well, we’re pleased to have you. So to kick things off, tell us a little bit about Talkalytics. Yeah. Talkalytics is a voice-first insight platform, and we really pull the truth back into marketing. So we have like, it works like a one friction-free link that can be a text, email, or QR code, or even a tablet at a checkout, where we invite someone to leave a 60-second voice note. And our AI transcribes the clip. So we read the tonal cues like stress or excitement. We cluster themes with large language models. And we feed this whole thing into a live emotion dashboard straight to the team. You’ve said that voice is 70% more revealing than video, which is news to me because I always think of, you know, when I see somebody, I can see an eye roll. I can see a smirk. I can see all manner of, you know, expressions that we make as human beings. But can you unpack what makes voice such a powerful emotional signal for marketers and how you capture that and translate that into insights? Yeah, absolutely. The human voice is loaded with micro signals from pitch, pace, tremor, like even half second inhale, like before a rant, I was like, a smile on the camera can be faked. And a little tremble in your voice, it’s harder to control unless you’re a trained actor. So voice is really uniquely unguarded. So you can’t really like backspace or like run your answer for like a GPT to make it sound clever. And people really speak from their heart and their gut. And honestly, they also overshare. So that rawness really is our gold. And our system really listens for those tones and vocal expressions. So everything from frustration to boredom to being polite or understanding sarcasm. And we paired up with a tonal score and with the actual words. So the phrase, let’s say, for example, that’s sick is different than that’s sick. You know, that’s crazy. So you really want to make sure that your tonality and what you’re actually trying to say ends up in the right bucket. You’ve gone from Musical.ly to TikTok to now Talkalytics. So you’ve been at the forefront of all these tech and cultural shifts. How has your perspective on audience engagement evolved along the way? And what do you think most marketers still get wrong about understanding their customers? Very loaded question. So Musical.ly has really taught me creation is engagement and users didn’t just watch, they jumped in, they remixed, they wanted to be a part of it. That was pure unfiltered participation. And as the platform grew and, you know, turned into six are going to explode it. I kind of saw that how authenticity faded out and I wanted to bottle back this feeling that we originally created with Musically, which was really about being passionate, being genuine, being, you know, just living your passion and being truly who you are. And so I took this bottled kind of feeling that we wanted to create or this platform we wanted to provide and went back and looked into, okay, what is the most useful case we could create that matches, you know, the user’s excitement, wanting to share what they want to talk about to a brand like feeling heard is so important to them versus also making it sense for the brand because marketers have very specific questions they need answers to and so that’s really when I realized we don’t particularly need for certain use cases, social listening, what we need is social asking. And so that is really where we allow people to put everything into their own words and turn their passion into real engagement for brands. I love that. You know, most brands are still using traditional metrics, you know, clicks, surveys, that sort of thing. But Talkalytics is focusing on emotionally intelligent AI. What’s the learning curve in adopting emotionally aware voice feedback and how do you prove its ROI, especially in an industry that is, I dare say, reluctant to embrace new things or sometimes even afraid of them? Yeah, I think the ramp up is really quick because we’re not asking teams necessarily to relearn analytics. It’s more of like swapping your static checkbox for a living and breathing dashboards with emotions. We’re big of talk analytics as the net promoter score with a heartbeat. So that promoter score touted the intent. Would you recommend us? But we serve as actual emotions behind the intent. So Instead of like a single 1 to 10 score, you really understand if people are excited about you as the product, as a brand, and how they truly feel about you. Emotionally engaged customers spend two times more, which is a stat every CMO wants to hear and one that I can attest to because I’m a fan of Apple, which is at least two times more, and Nike, which is approaching two times more most of the time I make a purchase there. Can you walk us through a real-world use case where Talkalytics has helped a brand boost performance by tapping into that emotion over, say, opinion? Yes. And one of our most telling cases involves actually a very big global tech company that is hugely respected for innovation, but very often slammed online for being cold or maybe unsafe or having privacy issues and stuff like that. So they hosted actually an event offline packed with sponsors and media, and they wanted to understand if that event was really moving the needle for them. So we deployed Talkalytics on site with QR codes and badges and tablets where people could record their voices. And so by the end of the week, we really were able to capture like thousands of voice responses. And so we then mapped the emotions to the main signal of what people were saying and how they were feeling about the brand. And so it turns out that they were actually more curious than judgmental. So you online, and that is a perfect example how, you know, when you focus on the social listening aspect online, people like having all these strong opinions, but then you ask them on the ground of like, okay, How do you feel about their products? And people were actually, honestly, I don’t really understand it. I feel insecure or I don’t really know how to trust them better. I would love for them to explain to me this and this more. I don’t fully get it. So that really helped that company to address this emotion of, insecurity and feeling unsafe and actually doing a better job in their marketing channels, their communication and ads, and just proving that this event offline was actually a great vessel to bring people together and to create that trust as well. Very curious to know who you’re talking about. I know you’re not going to tell me it’s okay. A company that’s a tech company. How do your personal roots influence your leadership style and your mission to help people, you know, your partners and clients reach their full potential? Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a world that is pretty much pictured like the sound of music. Have you seen the movie before? Of course, yes. So my mom is actually yodeling in the Alps right now as we speak. No joke. We wear these dresses, you know, but leaving such a small town and moving to China, to London, to the rest of the world has really been, you know, been teaching me a lot of persistence, resistance, and really I believe that dreams don’t like, you know, your postcodes doesn’t define your dreams. Mm-hmm. And so that mindset shapes really how I lead today. So I ask every new hire, for example, where do you want to be in 10 years? Because when I decided to leave my hometown, it was the same thing. I imagined myself where do I want to be in 10 years, right? And so the better you understand where someone wants to be, it could be equally a client. Like, where do you want to be with this? When you sign up Autocolytics, you say like you have it, we can resolve your pain point imagining we were solving that pain point, like what is your ideal outcome? And so we’re really able to support on that journey by knowing that. And so here’s one thing that most people don’t know about me either. I have been a waitress for years and it really taught me that a purpose exists in every single role as well. So there’s a lot of people also, you know, leadership and purpose and potential all go together for me. And it’s really important that you also understand your purpose because you can have lots of inspiration, but you’re not going to build up persistence and persistence if you are not fully sold on your purpose. So referring back to the waitress story, as a server, you might think you have like limited power, but you can flip someone’s entire day. So for example, they walk in stressed, but you can turn them around smiling. So even as a waitress, you have like impact on the most granular levels. So whenever we’re working with clients or, you know, the team or building products, shipping new code, it’s really about how could we also lead every single one of us, no matter with the daily interactions we have, lead with purpose with what we’re doing. Looking ahead, how do you see emotionally intelligent AI reshaping the future of customer experience and brand storytelling, especially as voice interfaces are going mainstream? I think we’re heading towards a world where sentiment is as easy to capture a keyword. So in five years, your earbuds or your car dash, or even the voice assistant on your coffee machine will pick up on like subtle shifts in your tone or emotions and have them over handed to brands in real time. So that doesn’t replace asking for feedback, but it does mean companies can sense mood and react on the spot before The whole Twitter or X shitstorm is going to come around. When it comes to modern day voice assistants, are you using them in your day to day life? And are you impressed by how they perform compared to the promises that were given on the consumer side from these massive tech companies who are building them? I think that is a very interesting question. And of course, I am experimenting a lot with voice-to-text email dictations and the day-to-day interactions. I do think they’ve got over the last year so much better. It’s an incredible support in our day-to-day life. And what we’re seeing with Talkalytics as well is that is why we have also an average of 30% higher response lift on surveys because the convenience factor is there. And more and more people are getting used to using their voice for everything, for switching their lights off, for turning music on, for even navigating the car. So I think as we are also helping these tech companies with using it and complaining and having feedback, helping them to get better. My last question is something of a crystal ball question. I like to ask this of everybody I have on the show, just because kind of want to know what everybody thinks we’re going to see in the coming time. And because you’re in such a specific area of the industry, you’re probably better suited to answer this than many. If you’re looking one year or five years down the road, what sorts of things do you think marketers are going to see in your particular vertical that are exciting to you? So very exciting to see will be that marketers are going to be able to be more personal. That means not one ad fits at all. We’re going to have adaptive narratives based on the person’s background, on the customer’s background and their own story to really fit into their emotional needs. And we’ll be able to just genuinely serve, I think, as marketers better. And that is one reminder that I really want to put to all marketers out there as well, is that we are essentially building a brand and the brand means trust and the brand stands for something. And the brand really curates emotion. So I think that the future will allow us to tap back into the actual emotion that we want to curate with our audience or customers versus over the last years, and I will say Musical.ly and TikTok has been a big part of that push. We have been pushing for reach, reach, reach and clicks and likes and getting out there. And I think it will be very exciting to see how we’re all coming back centered and are being way more intentional with who we want to reach, who is our audience, who do we want to engage with, and just having a much more intense, maybe fewer, but way more intense interaction with our customers and hence stronger loyalty. I love that. Well, Varian, thank you so much for being on the show. If one wanted to find out more about Talkalytics, where would you send them? So yeah, if you’re really curious to hear what your customers sound like, come to Quackalytics.com. But just don’t send me a voice note. Here’s the thing that we also found. People love sending them, but other people hate receiving them. Really? That’s fascinating. I mean, it’s so much easier. We listen to them for you. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for being on the show today. This was an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Richard.
