It’s one year short of a decade since the calm voice of Siri first announced itself. It seemed it wouldn’t be long before sci-fi long filed in the fiction would find itself not for the first time but a subject of non-fiction.
Apple really lost the initiative, Google just couldn’t, and Amazon, a late starter usurped all with the Alexa. People got comfortable with the idea until they realized that these devices are always listening to you. Even with the pushback, Amazon had sold 100 million Alexa devices by January of 2019.
But in terms of User Experience, Voice is still a very unused avenue.
Think of every customer support experience, where you have to dial a number, listen to 4 different layers of menus, highly confusing because the menu options are not sometimes clear enough, to finally get a response asking you to visit some webpage. So you try again. And get frustrated and leave it for another day or to huff and puff into the bank branch for them to tell you that the bank employee does not have access to that information and that you have to call customer support nevertheless.
Voice As Part Of User Experience
The importance of voice, and a real one is the future. User Experience is about having a great experience. And the just in time, overtly optimized, profit maximizations have absolutely killed the support experience.
We get it, you can’t get more people answering calls immediately and you have to funnel people through. But this is what everyone wants. Their lives and their time to be respected. And if you could use voice intelligently you could be a pioneer & a trend setter.
So imagine this, if people could send a voice note to a platform (could be even your official whatsapp number), and AI could break this down, immediately, and tell them they should expect a call back in X amount of time. This way people could go on with their lives instead of waiting on one end of a phone call that would never come, and agents best able to deal with a situation could deal with a problem could deal with it.
Voice As Part Of Search
Although there is research that voice based search would be 50% of the searches in 2020, we think it’s being way too ambitious and unrealistic.
eMarketer states that voice based commerce reached 2.1 billion USD in 2018, albeit just 0.4% of all ecommerce in the U.S.
But we cannot refute the fact that voice search numbers will be increasing. In 2018, one billion searches a month were done by voice.
So as a business, you have to think how to best leverage your business, products & services. If you can afford to bring in Voice to improve the Customer Experience, and also fine tune for Voice Search you will be miles ahead of your competition.
Here’s a nice post from Backlinko for the same.