The impact of voice technology for people and brands

Posted by Neha Sharma on May 26th, 2018

More than twice those currently used. In this race, voice technologies are configured as a clear winner, with the consequences that this will have not only for the daily life of citizens, but also for the relationship of these with brands. Successfully exploring this new technology requires establishing a correct strategy and handling some crucial aspects.

From Mindshare, in collaboration with J. Walter Thompson, an investigation has been carried out that explores voice technology and its implications for brands: SPEAK EASY. It is an analysis that incorporates several methodologies to compare the reactions and behaviors of the 'technological' voice to the writing or text. On the one hand, a quantitative survey was carried out on 6,780 people globally, qualitative research in Shanghai and the United Kingdom, consisting of a self-ethnography project, focus group, as well as a neuroscience experiment with 102 users of smartphones and buyers from Amazon, conducted in collaboration with Neuro-Insight, in which steady state topography (SST) brain imaging technology was used. In-depth interviews have also been conducted with global experts from all sectors, including artificial intelligence, neuroscience, marketing, sound and radio.

The brain activity during the reception of information by voice was much lower than that which required a physical contact with a monitor, and that is enough to bet on this technology, since it is in human nature to choose the path of least resistance. The use of digital virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, etc., will increase strongly during the next few years. In markets such as the United States, the implementation of the use of voice technologies is already very high.

Amazon Echo was the star gift last Christmas in the United States and, during this year, it is expected to sell 24 million Amazon Echo and Google Home. By the end of 2017, it is estimated that there will be 45-50 million devices in use. It is not surprising that this trend begins to take hold in Spain, a market that questions, as others, the precision and accuracy of this technology, which remains greater penetration to date.

On what will depend that this evolution is as we expect?

#1. That the level of accuracy is practically 100%.

Right now, the level of error is 5%, but significant improvements are expected in the coming years due to the continuous investment of the great technology companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple ...) and because, as more users use this technology, a greater dataset is generated that helps the speech recognition algorithms 'learn'. There have been great advances in the virtual assistants that begin to function in a much more sophisticated way towards two routes fundamentally:

• Voice recognition: try to identify the words spoken and convert them into text.
• The natural processing of language, which tries to identify the intentionality behind the words.

#2. Its development will depend on the ability of these smart speakers to attract developers and applications that are capable of incorporating new skills in them.

Well, it is very different to consider a useful voice assistant simply to put things on your shopping list, to have it to order songs or lists in Spotify, turn on and off the room lights, raise or lower the heating, order a pizza, call an Uber, explain the recipe of the paella or read an audiobook, among thousands of other possibilities. It is precisely the speed of development of that park of applications and the growth in its levels of use which seems to suggest a rapid and surprising adoption process.

WeeklyWoo