Rise Of Voice Assistants In India

Gnani.ai
Gnani.ai
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

The interest in Voice assistants among Indian users is increasing and according to this report titled ‘Speech and Voice Recognition market’ it is expected to grow at a CAGR rate of 19.8 percent between 2017 and 2023. India is not lagging behind in both adoption and making of Voice Assistants. Voice Assistants are slowly becoming a revolution with various verticals looking to integrate them into their application. From phones, smart devices to cars, voice assistants have become to act as a major differentiator. With Accenture’s 2018 digital consumer survey telling that 39% of India’s population likely to use voice assistants, pundits are betting big on voice becoming the preferred mode of transaction for E- Commerce, banking, and payments in the near future.

But a major hurdle in building the perfect voice assistant is that in India we have 22 official languages and the dialect of these recognized languages differ with the region as well. Hence, for voice assistants to function efficiently in India, it must be capable of supporting multiple languages with their varied dialects covered. The assistants must be built such that the users should be able to converse with it naturally as one would do so with others. Many industry majors have been struggling with respect to this. To overcome this Gnani.ai has been working on building the assistants in multiple Indian languages including Indian English for it to understand the various intents. For example when the command to the assistant is like “ Mujhe ICC cricket world cup schedule dikhao” the string contains two languages i.e Hindi and English, the assistant should be robust enough to recognize this and execute the command. This is what Gnani.ai is striving to achieve and has been successful enough to a great extent. To say that voice assisted mobile devices and smart devices are encouraging the development of smart homes and integrated smart devices would be an understatement.

Pic Courtesy : The Economic Times

Beyond mainstream usage, voice-guided interfaces have tremendous benefits for those with visual and cognitive impairments. Even as brands wake up to the multifaceted realm of AI-powered voice assistants, the technology continues to evolve, expanding to impact newer businesses. Some of the key sectors that have embraced the voice assistants to transform customer experience are listed as under:

Banking, Financial Services and Insurance :

The significance of the evolution of Voice Assistants in this segment is crucial as it has undergone a major disruption. The rise of e-commerce, digital payment gateways, mortgage, loans, investments and insurances to the rapid rise of mobile banking and virtual wallets, banking has been one of the largest and fastest consumers of latest technology advances. Introduction of AI powered voice assistants would be the next major step in making the interactions between the customers and the banking institutions more seamless and natural.

Some of the skills that a voice assistant has to possess in its arsenal is to make transactions, pay bills, check account details, locate nearest ATM, recharge mobile phones.

Media OTT Services:

Media is another sector which is adopting voice assistants at an accelerated pace. With over 118 million people accessing these platforms, having a voice assisted application becomes the differentiator in going that extra mile in enabling the users to access the content using their voice.

The Voice functionalities of an assistant in this sector would be to

  • Play, pause, stop , fast forward or backward the music or video
  • Filter or search content

Hospitality:

The integration of voice assistants in this sector is considered to be the most exciting prospect in terms of providing the customers a one off experience. The integration of voice assistants has become a trend in it’s marketing and distribution strategy.

The areas of functioning of these assistants are

  • Guest engagement solutions
  • Reserve rooms
  • Enabling guests to place requests like housekeeping, room service through voice.

With the era of voice first digital experiences, voice assistants are transforming the way technology is consumed and experienced. While voice is driving this, there is still a huge service gap in terms of non-English language inclusions. Especially for a country like India, that has over 400 million Hindi speaking audiences. This was the driving force behind Gnani.ai’s formation. Bridging this gap and empowering billions of Indians to access the technology using their voice is our motto.

Gnani.ai

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