How Voice Technologies Enhance the Customer Experience

Everybody seems to be talking about voice interfaces and voice user experiences. Devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Home are dominating the market (Figure 1-1), growing by 18 million units in Q4 2017 alone, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRPs). That represents units, not users, given that many people have multiple devices. Apple’s Siri has declined somewhat over the past year, but still has 41.4 million monthly users, and this number is likely to rebound and become more competitive with the release of the Apple HomePod in February. Then, there is Microsoft’s Cortana, which has grown to just shy of a million users. The future, at least to some degree, will involve talking to our technology. But what exactly does this mean for your business and the experience your users have?

Figure 1-1. US installed base as of February 12, 2018 (millions of units). Source: Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, LLC; retrieved from http://bit.ly/2FjAljn

What Is a Voice Interface?

At its simplest, voice devices offer a different type of interface. Instead of clicking a mouse, tapping a screen with your finger, or typing on a keyboard, you can talk to a device and instruct it to do various things—a currently limited but steadily growing number of things. For certain types of tasks, people are already opting ...