Voice — The Next Frontier
I have a prediction to make.
In less than 3 years, most of the interaction with apps and devices will happen using voice instead of typing, swiping and pushing buttons.
Let’s accept it. Human beings were not born to write and type. While we have written on walls, leaves and paper for centuries, and typed on computers for the last few decades, it has been limited only to the selected few (the educated class). It has covered only a part of the population. Vocal communication, on the other hand, has been around for ever.. Dialects may vary but all human beings learn to speak within their toddler years.
And this is where the next big leap is happening. So far, the communication with the computers was happening only via text instructions. However in the last few years, there have been many products in the market that make voice integration with software applications simple. Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are examples of popular platform where we can integrate voice into user journeys with little effort.
“Talk To Airtel”
At Airtel Xlabs, we integrated our user journey with Google Assistant. We chose Google assistant primarily because it is available on all android devices by default. Users don’t need to invest in an additional device like Amazon Echo to take advantage of it. Google assistant is available on all android devices in addition to the Google Home range of devices. We integrated the top use cases that customers call our call centre. Just say “Talk to Airtel” on Google assistant, to invoke our application.
The integration with Google assistant is quite straight-forward. It needs someone with node.js experience to integrate with the server backend systems.
Architecture of Google assistant
We are using Node.js to handle high load. The services are implemented as micro services, one service for each intent.
Flow on the app
Results
we are receiving around lakhs of requests on Google assistant. This is a direct saving on our cost-to-serve, while also improving the customer experience. It has decreased the number of interaction it takes a user to complete a journey.
Next step:
Support more languages. This is even more critical for a country like India where english is spoken by only a fraction of the population. As Google starts supporting Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, etc, we plan to integrate them in our journey. This is when the real Bharat will come online. And that, my friends, is not far away.
