Voice

State March 2018

Different approaches for Voice Interfaces are under development. SmartSteuer and Haufe already offer Skills in the Skill Store from Amazon.

Why?

„Amazon kills the buy button“ was maybe one of the most inspiring headlines I heard during last years conferences. But with the massive push of Alexa since the introduction, especially around holiday season last year, Amazon brought Voice Interfaces to a broad audience. And guess what: Alexa doesn't have a buy button!

But not only Amazon invests heavily in Voice. All the big players are in the game: Google‘s Assistant, IBM’s Watson, Apple‘s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Nearly all of the tech-giants have their own assistants. In case of Amazon and Microsoft they even went further last year and announced a cooperation between their two AI’s, like Salesforce did with IBM.

And the story goes on: If you e.g. look at last years CES or IFA, integrated voice solutions were one of the major topics. Speakers, Refigerators and of course, cars. All will come with a voice interface.

And all this is shaping the future and expecations of our customers.

• “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020” according to comscore
• “About 30% of searches will be done without a screen by 2020.” via Mediapos
• “We estimate there will be 21.4 million smart speakers in the US by 2020” according to Activate

The battle of the platforms just began. While especially Amazon and Google offer broad support to build Skills (Amazon) or Actions (Google), the other companies don't provide much public information. As Amazon surely dominates the hardware, Google's Android controls a large bite of the mobile market's voice access. Meanwhile IBM and Salesforce build an alternative superpower in terms of business solutions.

And it’s just the beginning: Amazon is heading now for „Business“. With Alexa for Business they offer a complete infrastructure clients can use for Business purposes. Combined with AWS it‘s even more powerful.

In addition to the Tech Giants and their solutions, new players also pop up in the market, e.g. the open source voice assistant from mycroft, or Cisco’s Spark.

Nonetheless, Voice also has caveats:

• Italian grandmother learning to use Google home
• Scottish Elevator With Voice Recognition

Besides these funny aspects, Voice Interfaces confront especially HG with real challenges. Branding for example. If screens doesn‘t exist anymore, what defines the brand? What kind of „personality“ do we want to be? Or the products. How a service, tool, app should look & feel like with voice? Online shops? If voice kills the buy button, how are we going to sell things then? How will Lead Generation work? What happens to Search, Online Media or E-Mail?

Psychology, Data, Economics, Content, Creativity … here disciplines really need to mix up to create a great customer experience.

Well, good news. People will search forever, and keep on buying stuff online. But the game changes, and it changes quickly. How we will take action?

Highly recommended regarding voice:

So it’s time to get on it!

Technology choices/solutions

• Alexa Skills
• Google Actions

Our projects

• VoiceFirst – Voice Stream: Alexa haufe.de news skill live, PoC Google Assistant, Bewerbungstrainer in production
• SmartSteuer

Contact

Christian Kempter, Ioan-Bogdan Cimpoesu, Teodora Onaca, Drazen Stuparic, Björn Waide