Voice technologies have been disrupting the way we live, transact, and interact with each other. In the last two years especially, speech recognition technologies have seen widespread adoption across all the industries – including healthcare, banking, media and retail.
India has emerged as an important innovation hub and a key market for voice technologies in a short span of time. The number of voice shoppers in India is predicted to reach a whopping 168 million by the end of this year, according to consult, Dents u India’s digital agency.
Voice-search queries in India are growing at 270% per year, according to an MMA and Isobar Report published last year. The increase in use of voice searches, virtual assistants and conversational AI is compelling businesses to take a relook at the way they interact with customers. About 99% of the companies view voice-enabled experiences as a critical part of their future enterprise strategy. Brands are therefore focusing on ‘conversation-first’ strategies to analyze and improve customer experience in the digital-only era.
Voice technology has evolved a great deal since its introduction about 70 years ago. Advanced technologies like Natural Language Understanding (NLU), conversational artificial intelligence (AI), and neural text-to-speech (TTS) have helped push voice tech to the next level. Today, an Amazon Alexa, an Apple Siri or a Google Assistant has become integral to our lives.
How does voice tech evolve from here? Here, are some promising new technologies that are likely to push voice to new frontiers in the coming years.
Voice cloning: Voice cloning may have sounded like science fiction a few years ago, but not anymore. Neural networks and machine learning can synthetically create voices that sound natural and human-like. This artificial simulation of a person’s voice is disrupting many industries already. Like Deepfake, or AI that digitally alters a person’s image/video, voice cloning has already run into controversy. The documentary ‘Roadrunner’, which used voice cloning software to create words that were not actually spoken by the late chef Anthony Bourdain, spurred discussion About synthetic media ethics.
Nevertheless, its ethical use cases hold great potential to transform customer and audience experiences.
Personalization: Personalization is no longer just a ‘nice-to-have’ after thought for brands while offering services. With low-code/no-code solutions, machine learning, NLP and sentiment analysis, businesses will take personalization to the next level in the coming days. Voice-enabled services of the future will be equipped to understand customer intent and requests in a much better way and deliver interactions that are tailor-made for an individual’s unique needs.
Voice-enabled chatbots: Voice tech-enabled chatbots are already popular and will continue to become more intelligent, human and efficient in the future. They will be widely used to enhance customer experiences, cut down costs, detect fraud etc. Better functionalities such as payment options, predictive analytics etc. will ensure that chatbots have a direct impact on a brand’s revenue.
Voice tech has already turned much of science fiction into fact. These exciting new innovations in voice tech are capable of opening vast unexplored vistas of opportunities for organizations, while also vastly improving the consumer experience. These are interesting times for voice tech.
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