We’re thrilled to announce the release of AI Voice to Rockbot customers. This feature, which instantly transforms text into natural-sounding audio, was first engineered to improve efficiency for our internal production team. Helping them take advantage of this opportunity helped us realize we had created a tool every customer needed.
If you're already an Audio Messaging customer, AI Voice is live in your dashboard right now – no setup, sign-up, or additional cost required.
The Origins of AI Voice
Rockbot’s expert production team builds a high volume of custom audio messaging for enterprise clients every day. These customers regularly ask us to take one standardized message and customize it for their hundreds of locations. However, whether you're paying for voice talent or recording your own team's voices, this project can quickly become resource-intensive, from recording and remastering to post-production for every message.
We started thinking about how this scenario might play out for brands of all sizes. Whereas larger brands want efficiency at scale, smaller brands may not even try overhead messaging because they’re not sure it's worth the effort.
It became clear that message creation was a major barrier for all kinds of businesses, and AI Voice exists to lower that barrier. Here's what that looks like in practice:
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Ready-to-play audio in seconds – no recording or uploads needed
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More than 20 voices, with previews, speed control, and the ability to save favorites
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Multiple languages supported within a single message
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More than 100 script templates, for anyone starting from a blank page
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Included at no extra cost for every Audio Messaging customer
And this is the story of how and why we built the feature.
Where We Started
In-store audio reaches shoppers throughout the location, helping brands connect with people even when they’re not looking at a screen. Research from IAB Canada shows that in-store audio can influence purchase decisions and drive shopper engagement, reinforcing the value of overhead messaging for business growth.
For this reason, we wanted to understand why some of our Audio Messaging features were used more frequently than others. We looked at usage patterns by business size, location, and industry, and found that the need for faster, more streamlined ways to create audio messages was universal. It also became clear that content freshness was a top priority – teams need the ability to update their messaging regularly and efficiently.
What We Built First
In a production studio environment, the options are endless. However, as we talked to our customers, we realized that time savings was top of mind, and we set ourselves the goal of solving for that - finalizing a message in about two minutes.
We built AI Voice on Google's text-to-speech technology, since Google is a leader in generative AI, particularly text-to-speech. It was straightforward to bring that capability in, make text-to-speech available to customers, and do so at an affordable rate. Incidentally, the rate of improvement in AI functionality seems to accelerate by the day, with meaningful jumps in AI voice quality even in the time we worked on this initiative.
Because our goal was to release technology that was genuinely useful for customers who didn't have much time for audio messaging or who required a high volume of messages, our solution had to meet their need for speed and scale. We learned that many of our customers were turning to low-cost freelancers to create the voiceover, piece together a backing track, and try to make in-location messaging work on their own. We knew we could offer them a better alternative.
What We Learned From Customer Testing
Before we brought AI Voice to market, we reached out to some of our existing customers to hold moderated sessions and to get their first-hand input. Overall, the response was strong.
We ran sessions with customers across verticals, most of whom already use audio messaging in some form. Going in, we expected feedback about voice quality and maybe a few feature requests. What we got was more specific than that:
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Most customers had a clear opinion on what they wanted to hear, like one who wanted a deep baritone voice we didn't have, and another who asked how to add an Irish accent for St. Patrick's Day.
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Creating from scratch could be challenging. Several users commented that they were generating scripts in outside tools and then copying them over
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The results spoke for themselves. Eight of ten users said they'd publish the message they created that same day, and many left surprised by how natural it sounded.
These responses and others directly informed AI Voice and our top priorities for additional features going forward.
What's Next
Here are some of the enhancements we’ve got in store, designed to help teams keep content relevant and fresh with less effort.
Local Messaging With Corporate Control
Sometimes a single store in a much larger fleet needs to run a local promo that nobody else in the chain needs. For example, picture one location that's overstocked on a seasonal product line and needs to move it. That store has no local marketing support and no way to generate content on its own – plus, going through corporate for something that specific and small is slow and expensive.
Our goal is for someone at the store level to create the message directly, with corporate approval as the only remaining step before it plays. To that end, we're building an enterprise approval flow to manage that, since delivering faster, more localized content also means giving brands a way to manage the risk that comes with it.
Dynamic Content
Further out, we're looking at dynamic content: a recurring update, like local news or a daily special, pulled automatically from a source, branded for the store, and voiced without anyone having to write or record it. Imagine a location getting a fresh update every 30 minutes without anyone on-site doing anything to make it happen. AI Voice is the first tool in what will be a full studio of AI tools built to ensure content freshness and variety at scale.
AI Voice is now available to every Rockbot Audio Messaging customer at no extra cost, and it's built for volume: daily promotions, updates, and location-specific messages that need to go out fast. We also know that sometimes extra hands make the difference. When studio-level polish is essential, our Audio Production team is at your service, offering professional voice talent, licensed music, and mixing built for in-store playback. Teams can use whichever resource fits the message, without switching platforms.
Learn more about AI Voice or schedule a demo to see it in action.
For more guidance on in-store audio, check out our in-store audio playbook and our guide to in-store retail media.
