Indian startup Emotix has designed Miko: a companion robot for children’s development and entertainment. As shifts in gender roles unsettle the traditional child-raising process in India, Emotix’s robot is helping to ease the shift for parents into a new era of inclusivity and acceptance.

The digitisation of India is drastically impacting how people shop, communicate, and entertain themselves. But with dark social platforms unleashing a tide of misinformation and the government pushing to centralise personal data, web users are quickly realising the dark side of connectivity.

Voice recognition tech is becoming increasingly advanced, leading more people to use it in their everyday lives; the virtual assistant market is set to be worth $3.07 billion by 2020, and Amazon expects to sell ten million Echo devices in 2017 alone. But do people really want to chat to their devices?

As more and more people worldwide use virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa, both within homes and on the go, it’s becoming increasingly important for brands to consider how these AIs respond with their ‘voices’. What should they sound like, and what kind of tone should they take with users?