Hey Siri… Voice is here to stay!

If you between 25 and 50 you have probably spoken to your voice-enabled device in the past weeks or months. Most likely you have used voice assistance (VA) to get directions while driving, call someone or let your VA read a text message to you, or you have used voice technology to search for something or buy something. Voice technology is becoming a dominant force in people’s daily life and changes the way we search or shop online. But how?

There are three developments that can be seen when looking at how voice search is changing people’s digital behavior.

1. Digital communication becomes more personal and informal as people start to communicate with VAs in the same way as they talk to each other. This will also result in more unspecific search request and will give rise to ‘inspirational search’. Meaning that we do not ask for “the best Korean restaurant in London” anymore but we ask our VA to “take me to a cool Korean restaurant to hang out with my friends”.
2. Voice-based search leads to less ‘freedom of choice’ for the consumer. While current text- and image-based search engines offer several choices, voice-assisted search generally offers only one option based on relevance. This will have a strong impact on both low involvement and high-involvement products and services. For example, a customer has visited an Italian restaurant 1-2 times in one months. This customer is now asking for recommendations for a restaurant. The VA will most likely feedback the previous restaurant as the best choice, because the customer has already been there twice, indicating a personal preference.
3. People will expect more personal and informal interactions with businesses and brands. This can already be seen in the U.S. or Brazil where messaging services such as WhatsApp are a common tool to communicate. For example, in Brazil it is perfectly normal that your hairdresser is leaving you a voice message reminding you that you have an appointment in 2 hours.

In a corporate context these developments will affect with great certainty all industries and most areas of operation. Especially marketing, sales and customer service will be impacted by voice technologies. From voice assistants managing orders to more complex, AI-powered voice technologies interacting with customers or taking part in outbound marketing activities.

With over 500 million Bluetooth headphones sold each year voice assistant technologies are the direct benefactors of that development and it will not slow down in the future. These current developments in the voice and audio market show strong similarities to the rise of smartphones and alongside that the success of social media. With that in mind it will be extremely interesting to see which companies will be the first ones to develop strong audio and voice marketing and sales strategies and who will be able to execute them first and best.

For many this topic might be something completely new. Therefore, we have compiled a list of interesting articles about how voice technology is already having an impact on different industries:

1. Gaming: https://summalinguae.com/language-technology/voice-controlled-games/
2. Health: https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/10/04/big-tech-seeks-to-improve-speech-recognition-tools-for-people-with-disabilities
3. Hospitality: https://modernrestaurantmanagement.com/more-restaurants-are-turning-to-voice-tech-here-are-three-reasons-why/
4. Automotive: https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T0404088EN/next-generation-bmw-voice-assistant-to-be-based-on-amazon-alexa-technology?language=en