Voice on Voice

These past few weeks have seen a raft of fundraising in the voice space, and the variety serves as a stark reminder of the different spaces in which voice can drive value.

This week, the focus is on small but meaningful updates a range of big tech companies are making to their voice assistants and device ecosystems.

This week the world of voice tech we highlight a story where an AR headset, and the voice assistant that commands it, assisted a surgeon in conducting a successful surgery— a promising new application of voice in health and medicine

If you asked a handful of professionals who work in and around voice technology about the state of maturity of the industry, you’d probably get a wide range of answers. Is it still in the realm of experimentation and assessment, or has it arrived as a fundamental pillar of any digital strategy, one to be invested in for the long term?

Can third-party voice apps thrive on Amazon, Google, and Siri’s voice assistant platforms? That is the question that voice news confronts us with this week.

This week, Voice on Voice highlights three themes in the voice space: the evolution of generative language models, innovations in the voice shopping experience, and some diverging US and international governmental attitudes toward voice.

In our era of texting, where sometimes it feels like no one actually talks to one another let alone makes eye contact, it’s important to remember the potency of the human voice. And today’s stories begin with a vivid reminder: 7 billion voice-based messages are sent across the world, on just one platform: WhatsApp.

The country of Albania joins a small-but-growing number of governments that are adopting voice AI to serve their citizens, a notable fact since Albanian is not a likely language in which to find fluent voice assistants. But thanks to efforts like Amazon’s MASSIVE dataset, which includes Albanian, the infrastructure for the global reach of conversational AI is being released.

A virtual reality “metaverse” filled with avatars and screens is still in the early stages: part reality, part aspiration, and part hype. What it will become exactly is still unclear. But companies are investing big into the idea, with Meta having poured $10 billion into the idea last year alone. And voice will be no small part of this project.

This past year, we’ve noted recent efforts in the restaurant industry to adopt voice. Wendy’s has partnered with Google Cloud, and Checkers & Rally’s with Valyant AI, to bring conversational into the drive-through and ordering process. This week, we start with a story focused on the Marco’s Pizza chain, which began in Ohio and has grown to over 1000 restaurants. All of these locations are poised to adopt voice technology, showing that momentum is clearly growing for voice to become commonplace not just in the home, but in the drive through as well.