A Brave New World: Voice-enabled Content. Is your organization prepared?

Managing experiences across any digital touchpoint is sure to get trickier every year. Plan on it. This year, it looks like voice is moving up the digital experience ladder very quickly. Many say that 2019 will be the year of the voice search. The year that voice search might even surpass traditional search. As the head of IT, is your infrastructure ready? As a marketer, can you provide a compelling experience on voice as well as you can on a screen? Those are the right questions to be thinking about right now.

The year of voice search

To firm up the statement that 2019 is the year of voice search, let’s start with a couple of leading indicators:

• Globally, smart speaker shipments grew nearly 200% YOY in Q3 2018. Amazon shipped the most devices, with Google close behind. Consumers are recognizing the value obtained from voice’s user-friendly interactions (Source: Strategy Analytics).
• 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022. That’s a 42% jump from today’s household ownership numbers (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants).

Screen-free devices are not going away and things like hands-free driving, smart speakers, voice activated remotes, and the like are creating a massive cultural shift as more and more people are adapting to the ease of voice-activated searching.

The technology is closing in. Just a few short years ago, voice recognition was… well, bad. However, the technology behind voice recognition is significantly improved and getting better every day. Today, most systems are more than adequate for recognizing speech, different languages, and dialects. In fact, Google has boasted over 95% accuracy rates for a couple of years now.

Voice input: The most efficient form of computing

Why speech? It’s simple. Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report cites that voice input is the most efficient form of computing. She states that humans can speak 150 words on average but can only type 40. In addition to efficiency, it’s just good business. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), it's estimated that 285 million people are visually impaired worldwide; 70 million people need a wheelchair; and another 360 million people globally have moderate to profound hearing loss. Globally, more than 1 billion people need one or more assistive products. That is a significant market size to ignore.

So what does a voice enabled experience look like? At Crownpeak, our product teams and even our partners are taking advantage of the ease of creating experiences across any touchpoint. Below is a brief voice-enabled example from our product team that incorporates better information from voice search results.

To take it a step further, one of our long-time partners, Accelerate Business Solutions, has been developing screen-free, fully transactional experiences. Take a look at this simple example they built of an insurance quote using Crownpeak DXM feeding Alexa. In the process they built an Alexa Polly, Amazon Lambda function, and an API endpoint to actually perform the business logic.

Take a look at this simple example they built of an insurance quote using Crownpeak DXM feeding Alexa. In the process they built an Alexa Polly, Amazon Lambda function, and an API endpoint to actually perform the business logic. (Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing you to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. This Text-to-Speech service uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech that sounds like a human voice.)

Pretty cool, huh? If your team is interested in exploring the capabilities of screen-free experiences, contact us for a custom demo or more information.