Contents · 2018-09-14 · Contents 1) How Voice Technology Will Emerge in 2018? 2 2) How Voice Technology is Poised to Take Over Tech? 4 3) Future of Voice Technology. 5 4) How Voice

Contents

1) How Voice Technology Will Emerge in 2018? 2

2) How Voice Technology is Poised to Take Over Tech? 4

3) Future of Voice Technology. 5

4) How Voice Technology can be a Threat to Smartphones and Apps? 7

5) Forecast for Voice Platforms in 2018. 9

6) Challenge of discovery and how to overcome it? 11

7) Essential phases of evolution of voice as an interface. 13

8) Possible impact of voice on brands and businesses. 15

9) Key Insights. 17

How Voice Technology Will Emerge in 2018

How Voice Technology Will Emerge in

2018?

Re-imagining the possibilities:

Imagine a time when you wake up, and just say ‘Good morning

Alexa’ and see Amazon’s Alexa switch on and provide you all the

traffic conditions of your usual route, weather forecasts, read you

important emails and remind you to take your morning

medications. Imagine being able to make appointments by just

saying it out loud and having calls scheduled according to your

preferences.

In your Alexa-enabled car, the car automatically plays your favorite

music while finding you an alternate route around traffic, and

giving you regular and accurate ETA’s. In your office, you set up

appointments by just talking to Alexa, and make dinner

reservations and add notes for tomorrow.

While coming back, reminders for you set by your family members

are relayed to you by Alexa, and you buy the required things on

your way back. On reaching home you are reminded of your

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end-of-the day tasks, and after that, your favorite show starts

streaming on Amazon Fire Stick enabled TV.

The above scenario may sound too good to be true, but this is the

vision that Amazon is aiming for. Amazon’s personal assistant Alexa

is set to move from smart speakers to touch screen. This can be a

big boost for the voice technology, and a threat to the smartphone

and app industry.

Not surprisingly voice tech is high on the list of priorities for big

names like Facebook to compete with established names like

Amazon Echo and Google Home. However, the potential use cases

for voice tech doesn’t end with home based solutions. It finds

incredible value in practical applications like

1 – Criminal investigation (check out Agnitio and Morpho

partnership for voice biometrics)

2 – Additional authentication for financial transactions

along with facial recognition as shown by Wells Fargo’s Commercial

Electronic Office (CEO) app

3 – Voice authentication has entered mobile commerce to make

shopping secure and safe. Names like SayPay and VoiceVault are

transforming the way online shopping is transacted, by integrating

mobile voice biometrics.


How Voice Technology is Poised to Take Over Tech?

Over 50% of all searches on the internet will be through voice recognition rather than touch or type.

Analysts have predicted there will be around 200 billion voice searches done all over the world by 2020.

Smart speakers are set to grow and there will be more than 21 million smart speakers in the US alone.

Experts have predicted that there will be a growth of about 130% in the voice technology industry.

As much as 40% percent of adults worldwide do voice search at least once a day.

With this type of growth, the voice technology sector will be a six hundred million dollar industry by 2020.


Future of Voice Technology.

With advances in fields of AI and Machine Learning, voice as an

alternative interface has gained a lot of attraction. Voice recognizing

smart speakers have become more common now and its

functionality unlocks a range of business opportunities.

Voice recognition can now be found in various electrical appliances,

gadgets, or even offices, where people use them for voice searches

or asking for statistics. The growing market for voice technology has

led to many companies investing in it and boosting revenues. And

rightfully so, because the future of interface is through voice

recognition and companies realize that.

The major companies at the moment, who are the high-rollers in

the voice technology field, are Amazon, Google and Apple with their

personal assistants. All of these major companies have formed their

respective ecosystems which include the people who use their voice

assistants.

● Apple has launched the HomePod powered by Siri, and the

main focus will be voice quality.

● On the other hand, Google Home has a more

search-dominant approach, which focuses more on

providing best search results using their services like Gmail

and YouTube.

● Amazon aims at focusing more on getting their customers

more services through their memberships.


While Amazon holds the leadership position with 70%

market share , Google too is giving a tough fight at second position

as depicted by the amount of attention it got at events like the

recent CES 2018 event.

The major companies can increase the usage of voice technology in

a significant way owing to their approaches. However, the main

concern of privacy is still an obstacle because most of the solutions

don’t have visual interfaces, and this poses a problem. This is

because almost all gadgets today have a touch-screen interface.

Hence, companies are now working towards incorporating touch

screens with speakers, to enable users to have a complete

experience. Also, the technology is looking complement emerging

technologies to be more versatile in nature and relevant to the

future.

Brands are also adding voice technology to their products to

provide an all-round experience to their consumers.

● Car companies like BMW has already started incorporating

Alexa into its cars starting this year, which enables users to

switch on the radio, get traffic updates, or get news on the

go.

● Companies have been using Alexa to do research and

analysis of data in order to get useful insights into their

performance and boost their progress.


How Voice Technology can be a Threat to Smartphones and

Apps?

A recent study by Accenture has shown that people who have voice

assistants installed use their smartphones much lesser for online

shopping and even entertainment.

Many people with voice assistants pointed out that they

didn’t feel the need to use their smartphones very often as

most of their jobs were handled by the digital voice assistant. The

low cost of smart voice based assistants have been challenging the

smartphone market in a big way and it is showing.

Accenture stated that voice assistants are proving to be a threat to

the smartphone market primarily because they form a hub through

which all your home functionalities can be carried out, which

smartphones don’t.

Also, the ease by which you can use voice assistants has taken the

world by storm, and the ROI is incredible because they are

cheap. Voice technology has been reaching 39% of the online

population in India, 37% in the United States, 34% in Brazil, 33% in


China, 26% in Germany and 24% in the United Kingdom.

The other reason why digital voice assistants are so popular is that

people find it interesting to talk to a speaker and get an accurate

response to their queries.

Almost all of the users who have been using voice assistants have

been satisfied with the service offered to them, and they feel like

using the service again and again, instead of using their

smartphones. This is one of the reasons why voice technology is

proving to be a threat to the smartphone market, and by extension,

the app development market too.

Smartphones rely on various apps to provide different

functionalities to the users, which is what made them so popular

with the users, as they could do a lot of stuff on their smartphone

rather than a PC or a laptop.

In case of digital voice assistants, all your jobs and tasks can be

handled by one assistant, without needing any extra apps, which

has attracted people and hence threatened the smartphone in the

bid to be the better alternative.


Forecast for Voice Platforms in 2018.

Voice technology has taken off in a big way and people have shown

a positive attitude towards emerging voice assistants. Google Home

and Amazon Echo are already making a huge impact in this sector

and there is a huge scope for the voice recognition technology to

grow in the coming years.

With the assistants getting more and more human-like, people have

started talking to them on a daily basis, asking questions, shopping

online, set appointments, and basically, organize their time.

Voice controls have also expanded into other sectors such as cars,

making them more interactive and safe . Voice assistants in cars

provide you best routes possible, play your preferred songs, alert

officials in case of unusual activity which can prove very useful.


People have started linking their voice assistants to their home

appliances and gadgets in order to make it a hub for their personal

tasks. Most of these assistants are used through smart speakers, but

soon there will be a touch screen incorporated in the speaker which

will also provide a visual experience to the users.

In 2018, Google and Amazon are set to expand the utility value of

their voice assistants to other sectors and boost the voice

recognition technology affinity with the users. Apple has just

launched its $349 voice assistant HomePod and the reviews are

encouraging. It is powered by Siri this year to compete in the voice

technology market as well.

The market is set to grow by folds in a couple years and companies

are jumping at opportunities to improve their voice assistants.


Challenge of discovery and how to

overcome it?

Voice assistants today are only available in smart speakers which

poses a different kind of problem. Only voice responses make it

sometime difficult to discover stuff as there is no visual medium like

in a smartphone. Unless you connect through the Alexa or Google

Assistant mobile app, there is no other way for the voice technology

to respond to this challenge. However, Amazon had added various

skills for Alexa which can be used by developers to add visibility to

it.

One way to handle this discovery factor is by push notifications.

Push notifications have been a staple function for almost each and

every smartphone app in existence, and they are useful to provide

important notifications and at the same time remind users to open

your app and use it more often.

Voice technology is set to evolve the same way. Experts have

pointed out that due to lack of visual discovery, most of voice

technology users will not use voice assistants a week later after they

bought it. Therefore, developers will need to proactively “nudge”

users into action, as opposed to waiting for them to engage.


Amazon has already added a “notifications” capability. It’s easy to

see how we can anticipate mobile app notifications being

transformed into voice notifications by programming voice

assistants to regularly provide notifications over voice controls and

remind users to do particular tasks to make them use voice

assistants more.

If we consider a particular voice assistant like Alexa, we can assume

that a person using Alexa has purchased Amazon membership and

with this assumption, we can program Alexa such that it regularly

provides notifications like, Alexa could prompt me to rate my driver

for my Uber ride, Alexa could notify me if any discounts are

running on products in my wish list. On an Echo Show, Alexa could

let me know if my favorite sports team won and ask me if I want to

see the video highlights.


Essential phases of evolution of voice as an

interface.

Voice recognition systems are gaining a lot of popularity and with

companies like Google and Amazon backing voice technology,

people have started using voice assistants to help out with their

daily tasks.

Voice technology has expanded and now, more industrial sectors

are incorporating voice assistants into their products to provide all

round satisfaction to their customers. BMW, for example, has

started adding Alexa to their cars, which allow people to toggle the

radio and get live updates on traffic and news.

Companies with voice assistants in place, like Google and Amazon,

have created their own eco-systems, which is basically a network of

all the people utilizing their assistants. Google’s assistant is more

focused on providing the best search results available to the user,

owing to subsidiaries like Gmail and YouTube. Alexa, on the other

hand, focuses more on targeting customers with Amazon

memberships and providing better entertainment and shopping

experience.


The other main phase that companies have gone through in this

sector is software competition. The voice assistants available today

are able to help consumers plan their daily lives, but in the near

future, consumers might want to wire their whole house.

That is when it will be crucial for a voice assistant to hand the whole

load of a house with multiple entities using the assistant at the same

time.

Keeping this in mind, Google and Microsoft have already partnered

up, linking their assistants Google Home and Cortana, to provide an

impeccable voice assistant.

Here are some notable names involved in the voice ecosystem:

● Echo and Echo Dot (voice)

● Echo Plus (voice plus smart home hub)

● Echo Show and Echo Spot (voice plus display/video)

● Echo Look (voice plus camera)

● Google Home

● JBL Link View with Google Assistant

● Jabra Elite Active 65t with Amazon Alexa

● Lenovo Smart Display with Google Assistant

● Polk Audio Command Bar with Amazon Alexa

● JBL Everest 710GA with Google Assistant

● Asus Lyra Voice with Amazon Alexa

● LG WK9 Wireless Speaker with Google Assistant

● Vuzix Blade with Amazon Alexa

● Optoma UHD51A with Amazon Alexa


Possible impact of voice on brands and

businesses.

Voice technology will be a great help at a personal level, sure, but

for brands, voice technology proves to be a challenge. How do we

turn our tone of voice into an actual voice? How do we integrate

customer services, brand communications and commerce? And of

course, how do we best combine our human staff with the

technology? Many such questions arise when we consider voice

technology for brands.

This problem can be overcome if given serious thought to. A

company looking to implement voice technology should get a team

in place and pen out the lines of conversation that are most likely to

be used by their customer.

Programming of the assistant must be done only after you have

settled on how your assistant will proceed to interact with your

customers. When it comes to building voice assistants, the

emphasis should always be on teaching your skill to understand the

user and to speak as opposed to the other way around.


So, the main thing brands should focus on, is to make their

voice-enabled assistants as helpful as possible by mapping out

conversations and programming the assistant that way. Most of the

times, if the assistant fails to solve a customer’s query, it leaves a

sour memory in the mind of your consumer.

Also, mapping out conversations is not that easy, as different

consumers have a different approach as to how they will initiate the

conversation, so it is important to keep in mind these minute things

and make your voice assistant as elaborate as possible so that it can

answer all types of queries by the customers and add value to your

brand.

Looking for some inspiration? Check out these use cases of voice

technology –

1 – Dominos voice-activated pizza order app through Amazon Echo.

2 – Patron Tequila’s voice-activated cocktail ideas delivered

through Amazon Echo turning it into a bartender.

3 – Whirlpool’s voice-activated washing machine to

start/stop/pause laundry.

4 – Uber was one of the first Google Home integration for

on-demand cab booking. It is now present on Alexa as well.

Want some more ideas to fire up your creativity? Then check out

this post about what can be done using Google Home.


Key Insights.

1 – Some incredible stats around Voice:

● “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020” according to comscore .

● “There will be 21.4 million smart speakers in the US by 2020” according to Activate .

● “By 2019, the voice recognition market will be a $601 million industry”, according to a report from Technavio via Skyword .

2 – Challenges and Opportunities:

● Challenge of context – Voice will truly bloom when it is able to cut out the noise and better respond to queries.

● Challenge of discovery – Screenless content discovery needs to be smart.

● Challenge of user experience – 73% users would continue to use voice assistants if they responded and spoke as well as human beings.

3 – Success factors:

● How well leading players (Amazon, Google, Apple) develop

voice ecosystem and lead it to maturity?

● How voice will complement existing/upcoming

technologies?

● How businesses will come up to develop stellar customer

experiences around voice technology?

Documents

Contents · 2018-09-14 · Contents 1) How Voice Technology Will Emerge in 2018? 2 2) How Voice Technology is Poised to Take Over Tech? 4 3) Future of Voice Technology. 5 4) How Voice