The Evolution of the Voice Assistant

Voice in your phone:

We are all familiar with the voice assistants that come bundled within our smart phones. Whether its Siri on the iPhone or Google Voice on Android (or Cortana on windows…), voice is becoming a more natural part of how we interact with digital data. I am personally a big user of it. A common phrase in my day now includes “Okay google, directions to …”. Data (1) shows that 65% of smartphone owners now use their voice assistant, to perform various tasks.

Smart phone voice assistants have access to a lot of data that naturally makes them “smart”. Data that is fed into it by us (searches, forms), and data that it can access through the phone including our calendars, our geo data and trends, contacts, apps, emails, and sensors on the phone. This allows the smart phone voice assistants over time to customize their responses to individual users.

Though Voice Assistants are accessible at any time, research shows that we are more likely to use it in private settings vs. public.(2)

Voice at your home:

Devices with iOS9 and Android 4.4 or higher, can now perpetually listen to your voice for the ‘Hey Siri’ or ‘Ok, Google’ commands. However, unless the phone is in your hand or within a meter of you, it is still hard to interact seamlessly with it at home.

This challenge led to the birth of the smart home voice assistant category. With speakers and microphones specifically designed to enable a natural conversation within a house, smart home voice assistants build on the initial momentum of mobile voice assistants as well as fill their technical gaps. It’s a category that has seen interest from the industry’s biggest tech. companies.

Amazon:

Amazon entered this category with its Echo product line in 2014. Using powerful far-field voice technology, Amazon has created a significant lead in this space, and is investing heavily to maintain it.

Usage data shows that Alexa can not only enable interaction with services (Spotify, Amazon Audible, TuneIn) but also hardware and e-commerce. Instead of “honey, remember to buy paper towels”, Amazon hopes people will tell Alexa “to order this month’s toiletries” and more. It is a nascent technology that can and will enable a lot of new business models.

Google:

Google just released their Google Home product and though they are a bit late to the party, they sit in an incredibly strong position due to their existing assets.

Android integration:

Google home will most likely have strong native integration with Android and that’s a powerful synergy. Having the personal knowledge inside your phone,and android applications, and combining it with far field voice technology means that Google Home will come out of the box much more customized to the individual buyer. It will also have access to the treasure cove of data that lies within Google Databases.

(Car : The second most common setting for voice assistant usage is the car. Google Car is another asset that Google can readily use to include in its voice assistant. It may not come to fruition any time soon but having your voice assistant travel with you at home and in the car opens a whole new world of interactions. At Home, you can ask Google to buy you tickets to a show and when you get inside your car, the directions are preloaded with traffic taken into account. )

Apple:

If Apple decides to build a similar smart home device, it will fit well within their model of delivering profitable services through hardware. Besides the apple TV, Apple currently doesn’t own any real estate in our rooms. However, like Google, Apple does have many of the building blocks required to build a smart home voice assistant.

Voice: Apple’s Siri platform can provide the backbone larynx inside the device. Strong native integration with Apple iOS will provide the brains.

Homekit ecosystem: Through Apple HomeKit, Apple already has and continues to build an ecosystem of compatible smart home devices.

Lastly, Apple is a hardware juggernaut. It has the capabilities, the supply chain and the network to readily deliver a hardware device to millions of households around the world.

Where Next ?

Voice: The new OS

The analogy here is quite simple. These smart home devices are the new ‘phones’. Android and iOS are successful because they have a large ecosystem of apps and services that play well with those operating systems. Similarly, for Alexa, Google or ‘Siri Home’ to be truly ubiquitous, these 3 giants will need the support of their 3rd party developer ecosystem. Amazon’s AVS, Google’s Speech API, and Apple’s speech Recognition API will define the success of the products they support. There is a app Voice Skill for that.

Voice and Conversational Commerce:

One of the most powerful promises that will be delivered through ubiquitous integration is Conversational Commerce. Conversational commerce has usually been associated with using chat functions for ordering your Uber or pizza. But a far lucrative reality is when you can conduct varied transactions directly via voice. “Alexa, find me two tickets for a Raptors game on a Saturday night in December”. Yes, we still have to discuss transaction and voice verification, and its ‘nuances’ but it will become feasible much sooner than we can imagine.

Overall, we are seeing a trend towards a more natural interaction between human and machine. ‘Touch’ in the last decade brought a more human way of manipulating digital objects, and the digital evolution continue its fusion with our senses, responding first to our voice and reaching ever further towards our synapses.

Data Sources:

(1)(2) — Mary Meeker Internet Trends report.