Conversational AI Trends in 2022

Here’s what the Conversational AI industry has in store for us.

It’s 2022, and we think it’s a perfect time to revisit the past year’s drivers in Conversational AI and take a sneak peek at the trends that will dominate the industry this year.

Voice tech post-pandemic

While so much in our lives has been put on hold over the past two years, this period has been quite exciting for the voice tech industry. The pandemic gave a boost to smart speaker adoption, conversational agents were at the forefront of the fight against COVID, while voice interfaces are predicted to be part of the touchless future are all are being forced into.

Voice cloning

Just as we predicted, it’s been a big year for voice replication technology. Microsoft unveiled Custom Neural voice, Baidu announced voice cloning advancements, venture investors proved their strong interest in the field — so we have many reasons to believe this trend will continue.

Virtual characters

We expect this trend to unfold in the next few years. However, by the end of 2022, we should see quite a few implementations of very realistic virtual characters that will speak different languages and replicate people’s facial expressions and emotions.

Metaverse race

The recent launches by Meta and Baidu prove that the virtual character trend will get a very exciting augmentation. Powered by VR and AR, all sorts of omniverse and metaverse will be populated by human-like virtual characters. This is where NLU and ML technologies will converge with visual technologies, to create a new kind of experience altogether.

Emotions and speech synthesis

The virtual character trend is sure to foster «emotional» speech synthesis. There are a lot of projects and startups working in this field all over the world, as well as the new technologies that will allow us to make synthetic speech sound human. And emotion management in AI will be one of the growing trends in 2022.

Custom voice assistants

More custom voice assistants appeared and this trend will continue. All sorts of brand assistants and enterprise assistants will appear in different industries, from banks to retail to automotive.

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