Voice on Voice

One of the ways voice assistants are evolving to be more frictionless and valuable to users is through adding proactive capabilities that often don’t require speaking more. While we want our assistants to be there for us, they need to assist while being unobtrusive. Features like automatic camera tracking on the Facebook Portal and Echo Show smart displays keep users in the frame during pictures or video.

Asian consumers in China, India, and Southeast Asian countries have spearheaded the global adoption of voice. In 2018, iProspect found that 62% of smartphone users in China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore have used voice-activated technology in the last six months. Usage has primarily been driven by the prevalence of inexpensive smartphones in the region, making capabilities like voice search and in-app voice features more accessible to consumers.

Google has been making substantial investments in its push to make Google Assistant the powerhouse of the Android smartphone. But the company has also been expanding its reach within the smart home through partnerships with popular household appliance manufacturers. Through its relationship with Samsung, Google Assistant now lives on Samsung TVs and can control Samsung SmartThings devices.

One of the most popular use cases of smart speakers is playing music, with 60% of smart speakers users saying they use their devices to play music. As a result, it’s no surprise that streaming companies are building robust voice strategies to tap into this preference.

The long-standing relationship between Google and Samsung, often wavering and hard to follow, is entering a new chapter with wearables. Samsung mobile phones leverage Google’s Android system (which includes Google Assistant), but Samsung also offers its own Bixby voice assistant and app store in the mix.

While Amazon Alexa leads in the smart speaker market, Google Assistant is strengthening its presence on mobile devices. Many Android phones come with Google Assistant already built in — bypassing the need to open one more app to get to the assistant.

Last week’s Alexa Live Conference introduced the largest amount of new features ever announced at one time. A quick refresher on last year’s conference: Amazon released advanced updates to make Alexa more natural for both mobile and smart speaker users.

Advancements in voice AI have pulled creators into uncharted territory: voice clones and deep fakes. Manually recording clips for video games, shows, and entertainment is time-consuming and expensive, but with voice technology, people can use existing clips to quickly craft custom recordings (of themselves or others) for tailored needs.

Voice profiling is already making its way onto the radar of marketers at major companies — Spotify patented technology to read listeners’ emotions through their voice. However, a more immediate compelling use case of voice analysis technology is for healthcare.

Although screenless smart speakers lead the market for voice-enabled devices, the popularity of smart displays is climbing. In Q1 2021, 38% of worldwide smart speaker sales were those of smart displays. With Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Nest Hub displays, it’s not difficult to imagine the allure of such products.