Last week, the Botmock team had the opportunity to attend and sponsor the Voice of the Car Summit in Sunny San Francisco! The Voice of the Car Summit was an event dedicated to talking about the future of conversational interfaces in the automotive industry and where the opportunities may lie in the short and long-term.
Here are a few key takeaways that we would like to share from the event!
Personalization
Overall, personalization is a really, really important near-term opportunity that could make (or break) the way that conversation and voice will be integrated into cars. With this, it’s all about getting things right early and building something that won’t just be a fun novelty for the user, but something that’s made to last. It’s also about making sure the user feels comfortable with their data, and understands how close insight can help lead up to a much more intriguing experience.
This is just a tip-of-the-iceberg description, but a lot of the ideas for this have been most likely unexplored, or are just coming up, so a lot to see in the near future for this.
Entertainment
Is asking your car to entertain you the safest thing in the world? There may not be one easy answer for this yet, but, it’s safe to say that the way people are consuming podcasts or audio-based content can shift and evolve with how much time people spend in cars and how the future of groups interacting with their car could look like as well.
While many of these solutions are still being battle-tested on more individual voice experiences, one can hope there may be some amazing experiences on the way for group entertainment in a vehicle to some capacity.
The Commute
The daily commute in the United States is only getting……longer. They might be small, incremental changes, but they’ll only keep getting more noticeable as time goes on. With this, to some companies, comes opportunity with entertainment, personalization, and experimenting with ways that voice can help be a sort of “companion for the ride”, rather than just a utility that you bark commands to.
Safety
Is the idea of a “voice in car” truly safe? There are teams of smart experts working on this around the clock, but overall, there is still a pretty high chance that voice assistants can actually be less distracting than talking on a cellphone and can be just as safe as talking to someone in your own vehicle.
The problems could come in with frustrating or difficult utilities. With this, it’s all about best practices to create a fair and rewarding experience that keeps the rider aware of their surroundings rather than falling pray to road rage or feel overwhelmed. At the end, it’s up to the builders of these conversational interfaces to keep user happiness in mind especially close when building for the car by following standards and making it just as pleasant as using a device at home like an Alexa or Home.
And to wrap it all up, we’d personally like to thank the Voice of the Car Summit team for having the Botmock team and for putting on a great event in the Voice First Events series. We look forward to attending more of these events in the future, and, we hope to see Voice of the Car back in San Francisco next year!
