Advances in voice technology and AI has led to voice assistants that are quickly becoming the most disruptive technology for consumers and consumer engagement. We are undoubtedly entering a new era where voice assistants will play a far more dominant role in the way people or consumers interact with their digital world, from performing daily mundane tasks like online search to more complex tasks like online shopping.
The Evolution of Voice Apps and Consumer Behavior
The evolution of voice technology into voice assistants is unique not only for its introduction of new devices and software, but it is completely changing the way users interact with devices. For many consumers, this is the first time they are using their own voice to command a device, which many consumers have only seen in science fiction until now. Interactive voice experiences are quickly becoming a part of consumers’ lives thanks to the rapid market growth experienced by voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri.
Changes in consumer activities has prompted a change in the way marketers and brands interact with said consumers. According to BrightEdge 2017 survey around 31.35% of marketers saw voice search as “The Next Big Thing” in search marketing while 3.1% of marketers already integrated voice search in their content marketing activity. Although, conventional SEO strategies are predominantly focused on the way users perform text searches, more and more users are using voice-initiated search using voice assistants like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. This shift is making it even more important for marketers to optimize their websites for voice initiated search results in order to get more traffic coming through to website from voice assistants.
The consumer shift to voice-first trend is making companies already invested in technology to enable voice marketing with some brands having capitalized on an early start with the voice assistants technology to build relationships with consumers by providing interactive experiences. Voice assistants, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, represent a new direct-to-consumer touchpoint for brands and make such interactive experiences possible. Voice Assistants offer an array of applications nowadays with over 100k voice apps available as Alexa Skills for Amazon Alexa powered devices and about 10k voice apps available as Google Actions available for Google Assistant.
Voice Apps Today
Voice Apps are used to perform a variety of tasks by consumers today like listening to music, hailing an Uber ride, checking out a new recipe, making an appointment, or learning about Halley’s comet. According to a survey by voicebot.ai , when looking at Google Actions available for Google Assistant, The Education and Reference category tops the list with just over 15% of all listed Actions, while Games and Fun along with Kids and Family account for 11% and 9% respectively. The biggest Alexa Skills category in the U.S., by a large margin, is Games & Trivia accounting for over 21% of all skills while Education and Reference, accounting for 14%, takes the second place.
In January 2019, Google announced that 1 billion devices had access to Google Assistant. These includes smart speakers, phones, automobiles, appliances, and consumer electronics. These voice applications represent a new source of revenue for brands offering interactive stories or exclusive features. It therefore becomes imperative for companies to invest in building a voice presence to develop voice-related experiences or in advertising on voice assistant platform through paid recommendations. The growing ecosystem creates a great opportunity to engage consumers through voice activated devices like mobile phones, tablets, smart TV’s, consumer electronics, and smart speakers.
Voice Technology, Voice Apps, and E-commerce
E-commerce is quickly catching on the technology use of voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa. The use of voice assistants in e-commerce is not only limited to the transactional phase of the purchasing process but concerns all the e-commerce capabilities like allowing users to search for a particular product on a website, listen to different product reviews by consumers, add and remove items from a shopping cart, tracking different orders and addressing issues by accessing customer support service. All of these stages in e-commerce offers unique opportunity to marketers and companies to learn about consumer shopping behavior, observe different purchase patterns, gain detailed insights into how consumer react to different stimuli.
Such useful consumer insights obtained by companies can help them to create new strategies to retain existing consumers and attract and engage new ones. With voice apps, companies are enabling consumers to place new orders, design newer and better products which better fit consumer needs and make better business decisions like which products to focus more and which products to drop from the existing portfolio.
The Ultimate Voice App Solution for Marketers
There is a major consumer platform shift happening resulting from the growth in voice assistant usage. For Marketers, to capitalize on this shift, they need to invest in engaging consumers via voice assistants early and experiment all the possible avenues of voice apps as a marketing and a research engagement channel. True Reply helps marketers reach the over 200 million consumers who presently use voice assistants in their homes, in their cars, and via their consumer electronics. The opportunity via voice apps today is to reach consumers in a personal and intimate way via voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. This opportunity is exponentially realized now that consumers everywhere find themselves home-locked due to the pandemic of COVID-19.
True Reply helps companies and marketers to launch custom voice apps instantly and seamlessly and gain actionable insights based on real time results and feedback. True Reply helps marketers launch research campaigns through voice assistants, like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, enabling marketers and companies to capture the emotion of participants at scale and gather real actionable insights due to the interactive nature of voice apps. Insights once only possible through expensive in person interviews which are highly costly can now be gathered at scale via voice apps powered by True Reply. The interactive nature of voice channels, like smart speakers and voice apps via telephone, easily captures insights based on emotions at a fraction of the cost of in person interviews and on a far larger scale.