Savanna has taken a bold step into the tech and digital AI space and has unleashed GUGU, a spicy new voice assistant. This ties in with Savanna’s latest product innovation, Savanna Chilled Chilli with hints of chilli and ginger.
‘How would Alexa behave if Alexa was South African? This was the question that led us on this year-long journey. What makes this piece of work special is that it’s insight-based tech – not just tech for tech’s sake. GUGU is the embodiment of that particular brand of spice we are all so familiar with in this country and the result is hilarious and addictive. She has an answer for everything, so we apologise in advance for the loss of productivity users may experience,’ explained Steph Van Niekerk, Grey / WPP Liquid creative director.
Developed for Savanna by Chakalaka Norris, the charismatic spokesperson for Chilled Chilli, GUGU is like Alexa, if Alexa were a certified member of Black Twitter, and ‘hella spicy’.
But what does GUGU actually do? Well, if you ask her, she can do anything any other AI can do, except she won’t because she simply refuses to solve people’s problems for them. Unless that problem is needing a Savanna Chilled Chilli, then for some reason, if you just ask nicely, she’s happy to put you in touch with that spicy game.
Tilesh Bhaga, Creative Technologist, Creative Grey/WPP Liquid explained: The GUGU voice assistant was built as a progressive web app based on React.js. This allowed for its capabilities to extend further than just a normal website. The brains of GUGU lives on a Google AI tool called dialogflow. The user would input a command which was either text, or speech which was then converted to text. This input was then sent to the Goggle AI to interpret the command. Based on the response back from the AI, we would determine the correct audio response to match the text and prompt that.
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