Siri, am I your best friend?
Apple introduced Siri in 2011. Since then, Voice Assistants are one of the biggest technological innovations and no one could assume that. Almost 10 years later, one in six Americans is estimated to have smart speaker (Google Home, Amazon Echo) and eMarketer estimates that nearly 100 million smartphone users will use a Voice Assistant in 2020.
I bet you had, at least once, some interesting conversation with your Voice Assistant just to see how it feels to talk to your phone and what sorts of information can “they” provide for you.
What is Voice Assistant?
Voice Assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, language and speech processing to provide any sort of help to users through phones. Its technology is built on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and voice recognition technology.
Main functionality is to assist user in tasks like:
- playing music
- performing mathematical calculations
- making calls and sending text messages
- making to-do list
- setting alarms
- streaming podcasts and playing audiobooks
- providing weather, traffic, sports and other real-time information such as news.
Although there is positive feedback on Voice Assistant and its performance, still less than half users do not use it on daily basis. Almost all users find the voice technology easy to use. They also say that it has bigger role then just saving their time, it also improves their quality of life.
VOICE ASSISTANT IN FUTURE
The goal of many brands is to design Voice Assistant with human/person qualities such as empathy and humor. Main idea is for it to be able to have a conversation like humans, but users have a divided opinion on this topic because of how natural something like that would feel for us. Would we truly ever get used to it? Could Siri really be our best friend? Most of users still claim they sometimes feel uncomfortable talking to the device.
For this technology to become even more smarter and effective in the future, here are some of the challenges and assumptions that follow:
- More information
Over time it is expected for it to have more specialized and detailed knowledge in different domains, but the problem is current amount and scope of tasks that need to be performed at the same time.
- Personalisation
Currently there is an opportunity to add customize settings such as gender, accent, adding some skills and providing some of the information about ourselves such as our name and workplace. Some of the ideas are that Voice Assistants access each user in a way that suits him or her personally, it would align the intensity of the conversation depending on other person and their personality. Each user’s information would be provided in a way they prefer it; detailed or briefly as possible.
- Proactivity
At the present moment, Voice Assistant responds to a user’s request and the goal would be to perform tasks and make decisions on behalf of the user. In other words, to stop being a reactive device. However, we should be thinking of how comfortable people feel about delegating that type of more serious task to the device. The downside is giving up some amount of control and potential positive side is having more personal free time.
- Interaction
The idea that Voice Assistant is limited only to the voice of the user denies numerous opportunities for successful interaction. There are many different features that can be used in future to enhance and expand scope of action such as facial recognition, technologies that track emotional states, the increasing number of customer data that is collected and even future ability to “read” users’ thoughts.
Voice Assistants have great potential to change the way we approach and interact with close technologies around us and the way we see brands. It also has a wide range and direction in which it can develop its customer experience, as well as experience between some brands with their customers. I believe that one of the biggest challenges in the future is trust of the users regarding the use of big amount of personal information and their protection, especially if Voice Assistant will take more important tasks in everyday life.
