Voicebox
A 2009 project that gathered the views of 16 to 25 year olds on a theme each month, visualised the results and set the data free, with a robot in Parliament.
A programme of the vInspired charity, 2009 onwards. Updated on 13 September 2026
What it was
Voicebox was a project from v, the National Young Volunteers Service, as the vInspired charity was then known. In its own words, it aimed to “curate the views of 16-25s, visualise the results in creative ways, and then set that data free”. Each month had a new theme; anyone could explore the results by age, gender, location and ethnicity; and the charity’s line to young people was that “this isn’t our data, this is your data”.
What it did
Its best remembered moment was in Parliament in the autumn of 2009: an industrial robot, built with Sidekick Studios, wrote out young people’s 160-character messages to MPs by hand, and politicians reviewed them on 16 October 2009. openDemocracy was unimpressed by the robot and more interested in the circular tag cloud of results on the Voicebox site, which is fair. The site is what the coverage still links to.
From the archive
The Voicebox results were published on their own site, voicebox.vinspired.com, and were not carried over to the platform when the charity closed. The archive has no Voicebox posts.
Coverage
- openDemocracy, 25 September 2009: Small robot in Parliament, not very interesting
- Lee Jackson, 16 October 2009: Kids of today, what are they like? Now someone has asked them
- tom-style, 15 September 2009: 160voicebox, on the handwriting robot
What happened
Voicebox closed with the charity in November 2018, and its data went with it. Its addresses are still linked from the 2009 coverage, which is why this page exists.
Do this today
Voicebox's data did not survive the charity. The research it commissioned on young people and volunteering did, and it is collected on the research archive.
Other programmes
All the programmes vInspired ran, and the whole story of Vinspired.