Future of Voice Assistants

Not Smart Speakers. Intelligent Conversational Assistants.

In not so distant future, intelligent assistants will be everywhere. We will be interacting with them both in our personal and business lives, as our own home assistants as well as someone else’s business assistants. Soon enough, we will be as dependent on them to keep our lives in order as we are on the GPS systems to keep ourselves from getting lost. The mass adoption of AI in users’ general lives is one of the key factors leading the shift towards voice applications apart from speed, efficiency and convenience preferred by Millennials and Generation Z.

Surely the early generation of voice assistants make a lot of mistakes, sometimes by mishearing you, or not being able to take a command in a conversational style or not get the context of the command or catching background noise and yes, it can be frustrating. However, as we move ahead with the fast paced developments in voice technology, it would lead to more compelling uses of the technology in all shapes and forms possible.

Before moving further, here’s a quick encapsulation of the evolution of voice technology over last decade by voicebot.ai :

Now let’s have a look at some of the voice search statistics from 2019 as per Brafton:

• More than 66 million American now own a smart speaker and Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple Homepod are definitely encroaching upon the desktop’s territory.
• By 2020, 30% of the web browsing will be screenless.
• 50% of all the searches will be voice searches by 2020. The statistics is definitely on the bullish side, but voice search optimisation isn’t the afterthought that it once was.
• At least 20% of the mobile searches are on voice. Google provided this statistics in 2016. The number is certainly much higher now as voice assistants are available on many more devices and in 119 languages.
• 75% of the smart speaker owners search for local businesses on a weekly basis.
• The average voice serp loads in 4.6 seconds, or 52% faster than the average webpage.

According to Econsultancy, in late September 2019, it was announced that 100,000 Alexa skills had been launched worldwide, up from 50,000 in September 2018; as of January 2019, Google had more than 4,200 Assistant Actions.

As per an article published by DZone, Voice technology is becoming increasingly accessible to developers. For example, Amazon offers Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that enables developers to add speech-to-text capability to their applications. Once the voice capability is integrated into the application, users can analyze audio files and in return, receive a text file of the transcribed speech.

Google has made moves in making Assistant more ubiquitous by opening the software development kit through Actions, which allows developers to build voice into their own products that support artificial intelligence. Another one of Google’s speech-recognition products is the AI-driven Cloud Speech-to-Text tool which enables developers to convert audio to text through deep learning neural network algorithms.

This is only the beginning of voice technology as we will see major advancements in the user interface in the years to come. In upcoming years, voice-enabled apps will not only accurately understand what we are saying, but how we are saying it and the context in which the inquiry is made.

However, there are still a number of barriers that need to be overcome before voice applications will see mass adoption. Technological advances are making voice assistants more capable particularly in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning. To build a robust speech recognition experience, the artificial intelligence behind it has to become better at handling challenges such as accents and background noise. And as consumers are becoming increasingly more comfortable and reliant upon using voice to talk to their phones, cars, smart home devices, etc., voice technology will become a primary interface to the digital world and with it, expertise for voice interface design and voice app development will be in greater demand.

Voice search has definitely established itself as the ultimate mobile experience and businesses should brace themselves up for the change. It might be true that voice search may never fully replace the text based search, however it won’t go quietly into the future either.