When you have kids in the car, you drive that much safer. But let’s be honest here, most Malaysians are a little more careless when they’re driving alone. In fact, while we were mining for insights, we found out that 9 out of 10 drivers agree that they drive safer with kids in their car.

Now the last thing the world needs, is another GPS app. With 1.4 million users on Waze, working with them was the best way for scale our idea.

What if we were able to put a kid (virtually) in every car to encourage safer driving?

We created Safe Mode. The world’s first kid-sourced GPS voicepack.

An entire campaign was built around this idea. From call for entries, to recording, to launch. We got the entire nation involved and held an audition to 'kid-source' Malaysians aged between 3 and 12.

Some 100 parents volunteered and a total of 60 kids were shortlisted, with 20 picked for the final recording. This resulted in charming directional prompts such as “All set. Don’t forget your seat belt”, “Re-routing. Eyes on the Road!” and “Accident reported ahead. Please be careful, OK?”

We scripted the lines, and matched it to over 80 specific instructions instructed by waze. We also used multiple variations upon start and arrival to include more safety messages and kids’ voices.

Unlike other waze voice prompts with singular voices, we had to curate over 300 reads and experiment with combinations of voices carefully to ensure a balance of smooth audio as well as ensuring variety of voices.