What Is Driving Voice Assistant Engagement
We Learned
To tell the crowd when we are taking a selfie…
Thursday 14th November Will Harvey, innovation Manager at Diageo and our very own Charlie Cadbury took to the stage at MAD//Fest to offer insight into the future of voice assistants, where it fits into the customer journey and what we have learned building Alexa Skills like Talisker Tasting.
Marketing is a tough, there are ever more channels to distribute messaging but its often still a challenge to get the message to land and drive engagement. Fundamentally, us humans are not programmed to be spoken at.
When we are engaged in a two way conversation we are far more open to receiving information, after all we all just want to be heard. The challenge for marketers has been to deliver two way conversations at scale.
Sci-fi has always predicted that one day we would talk to our technology but this April Jeff Bezos revealed in his annual shareholder letter to Amazon that:
“The vision for Echo and Alexa was inspired by the Star Trek computer.”
And Jeff is pretty good at delivering against his vision, currently 21% of UK households and 30% of US households have a smart speaker and we expect these numbers to bounce again after black Friday and Christmas. Smart speakers, however, are just the first step. Today you can buy 85,000 devices with Alexa built in including a while load of wearables/hearables allowing you to access your assistant on the go.
On the go is very much the direction of travel for Alexa, the new strap-line is “Alexa Everywhere” and we need to give more credit to the word ‘assistant’ if you can access your Alexa everywhere and delegate tasks easily trust in the channel will grow faster and lead to a rise in voice commerce.
We saw this in the early days of mobile, in 2008 with the first iPhones and apps very few people would buy anything on this channel, however, 10 years later it is the dominant channel. We are seeing voice commerce start to grow at this rate and are very bullish about the growth here.
See the Say It Now half of the presentation below, to get Diageo’s insights you’ll have to catch us next time we’re on stage together or get in touch, we love a conversation!
About the author:
Charles Cadbury is CEO and Co-Founder of Say It Now, the UK’s leading premium, award winning, developer of Voice Assistants and Messenger Bots and specialists in Natural Language Processing, the sub-field of Artificial Intelligence that enables computers to process and analyse large amounts of natural language data. Feel free to connect.