The Voice Is Your Stamp
United States Postal Service®
Issue 45 | December 2017
Agency
MRM/McCann New York
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Sung Chang VP Creative Directors Tony Jones, Shawn Kelly Creative Team Micky Treutlein, Jason Tisdale, Jane Kim, Petra Magno and Emmeli Osterdahl Director of Product Innovation Dominik Heinrich
Production Team
Associate Director of UX Spike McCue Senior Developers Trent Harvey, Ian Littmann Director of Project Management Petra Boden
Other Credits
SVP Group Account Director Caspar Ouvaroff SVP Strategy Director Karan Gera Account Executive Marielle Avallone Client Executive Director of Brand Marketing Christopher Karpenko Director of Innovation Bob Dixon
Date
2017 - ongoing
Background
For centuries, the United States Postal Service had been quietly innovating better ways to move mail. ZIP codes and Optical Character Recognition were revolutionary in their time, helping the widest mail delivery system in the world run efficiently even as it scaled larger and larger. In the new age of voice recognition, this Smart Blue Box, the voice stamp feature and its potential for a network of Internet-capable mailboxes was designed to be the next big step forward for mail.
Idea
At CES 2017, the United States Postal Service unveiled its innovation prototype, The Smart Blue Box. This AI-enabled assistant was designed so it could be installed on almost every one of the 150,000+ USPS blue collection boxes across the United States, or inside 31,000+ Post Offices.
When a customer approached a mailbox, a simple "Hello Blue Box" started the conversation with the cloud-based AI assistant. Customers could ask any post-related questions, getting the contextual answers they needed at the precise moment they needed them, without having to pick up their smartphone.
The Smart Blue Box learned to answer just about every possible question around postage, pick-up times, estimated delivery time, the location of the closest post office and the estimated wait time once the customer arrived there.
In a future state, the mailbox could recognise a customer's voice to authenticate and access their USPS accounts to charge for postage.
In other words, the voice stamp was born, a completely new way to purchase postage for mail and packages.
Using the existing postal infrastructure, which already scans every mail piece for origin and destination, the voice stamp would simply link the information on the letter or package and send it on its way.
Results
Smart Blue Box was tested in public spaces near USPS headquarters. Interaction reports from the AI platform were positive, indicating people were getting the answers they asked for. Test markets to roll out the voice stamp were being determined. The program continued to develop and evolve as an exciting new service opportunity for USPS customers.
Our Thoughts
A few years ago, people were talking about a time when inanimate objects would be digitally aware. Most of us didn't have the imagination to see quite what the 'internet of things' actually meant. Not a problem at MRM/McCann, where someone saw how you might bring speech recognition technology and voice recognition tech together in a post-box. Not just the USPS, but most businesses today need to have a constant programme of experimentation and innovation if they are to survive. How inspiring to see an organisation that was founded in 1775 still going strong because it values creativity, the ability to make things better through ideas. Like a voice stamp.