How voice interfaces will take over the enterprise

Ospoke
Ospoke
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read

With Amazon’s Alexa taking over your living room but seeming to have made no inroads into your office, you may be wondering ‘is this voice control thing ever going to be useful at work?’.

Well, according to the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Samsung the answer is yes. The reason that the behemoths of tech are investing so much in voice is simple: voice is the most natural interface. However, quite how we will get there is a much more complicated question.

To reach the goal of really useful voice interfaces at work, we need two things:

  1. Ubiquitous computing — we need to be able to talk, and be heard, whenever we want to exchange information
  2. A link between natural language questions and legacy software systems — to complete a workflow we need to receive meaningful information and give instructions to software that was never designed with this in mind

We haven’t quite got over either of these hurdles fully yet; if you work in a bar you’ll find that even if your Point of Sale terminal is enabled with a microphone, it would struggle to hear you over background noise, and if you could ask your stock management system if there’s another bottle of scotch in the store room then sadly it wouldn’t understand you.

In this case, why are the tech giants so confident and how will we get there?

There are three stages that we can envisage:

Niche integrations (1–3 years)

There are already some enterprise applications where voice interfaces are taking off. The tech is already there for simple information collection by voice on your mobile device. When you are out on a oil rig, getting your phone out of your pocket to inspect a pipe isn’t much fun. In these types of environments there has been a strong demand from companies to engage integration specialists who can custom build a voice solution. Despite being limited in relevance to mobile data collection, this niche will grow as more businesses learn about what is possible.

IoT revolution (3–7 years)

Now that voice recognition models can be shrunk onto a raspberry pi, it looks like we’ll be seeing more IoT devices soon. As IoT devices spread across your office, factory, retail store, farm… e.t.c. the ability to query your physical environment with your voice will grow dramatically.

Universal smart assistant (7+ years)

When all of our workflows, databases and devices are connected by one seamless AI system then the nature of work will change fundamentally. Mention “why are sales down?” to a colleague and a computer may interject, having analysed the correlation between sales figures, social media sentiment and production efficiencies, to say:

“Don’t worry Mike, this is simply a seasonal variation due to an above-averagely warm weekend, I’m 86% certain that sales growth will return next Tuesday.”

There’s a lot of work to do, but it won’t be long until you see niche applications spreading across the enterprise. In the meantime, it will only be the mobile field workers who have all the fun.

Ospoke

Written by

Ospoke

We voice enable your workforce, so they can focus on what they do best. http://ospoke.com

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade