Voice Controlled Computing: Will your company be ready?
The accelerated growth of cloud solutions, server-less computing and micro services are leading indicators of the future of computing. Those that are closely following technology growth and patterns recognize the next great computing platform will involve voice controlled customer solutions. Business’ success will gravitate around how well they understand and prepare for this rapidly approaching paradigm shift. Similar to the months and years just prior to the smartphone boom, we are seeing signs of technology platforms sprouting up and positioning themselves as the base for the coming era of voice controlled computing. Will your company be ready?
Amazon’s Echo and Dot clearly lead this space with a three year head start over Google Home. These devices are only the beginning, but they give us the first taste of the interfaces of the future.
Investment firms estimate there will be about 8.6 million total Echo devices sold this year, but that would jump to 41.3 million units sold in 2020 alone. In aggregate, Amazon would be selling roughly 113 million total Echo devices over the next 4 years.
How do companies take advantage of this proliferation of voice controlled devices? By jumping on board early and creating value added apps, called skills, for these devices. The secret sauce behind the Amazon devices is “Alexa”, the technology that converts voice commands into programatic requests and returned results into friendly sounding spoken responses. This “virtual assistant” has the potential to be incorporated into a broad variety of products such as cars or refrigerators or whatever products your company produces. Thanks to Amazon opening the technology to the public a year and a half ago via what they call the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), companies can get on board and start brining voice controlled solutions to their own customers.
Alexa has now became a platform, capable of supporting a full ecosystem of skills, which are essentially apps that you talk to instead of touch. Today, there are 10,000 skills available on Alexa. From ordering groceries to calling for an Uber to managing your retirement plan, these voice controlled solutions are out pacing the growth we’ve seen in mobile apps. This is a huge shift. Voice has the power to transform computing, by providing a natural means of interaction. Being able to talk to computers abolishes the need for the abstraction of a “user interface” at all. Just as mobile phones brought huge changes to technology and our daily lives, voice controlled solutions without screens and keyboards have the potential to be more useful, powerful and ubiquitous than people can imagine today.
Companies that don’t want to be left behind are already venturing into this market. We have already started to see voice controlled cars, security systems, light bulbs, tvs and more. Encourage your company and leaders to do the same. Have a look at what others are doing and then test the waters yourself by building your own custom skill for Alexa devices.
The knowledge and experience gained can then be used to begin formulating a company strategy for taking advantage of this new paradigm and capturing your customer’s interest. Get started now.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on June 2, 2017.
