Voice is in its infancy stage but quickly becoming the way we interact with our devices daily. The majority of voice usage comes from the big platform’s own applications and devices: Siri, Google Assistant, and the Amazon Echo device. More and more consumers have adopted voice, now on over 1B devices and the fastest growing interface ever. Voice is coming into the mainstream, however, there are a few flaws that prevent it from becoming ubiquitous as an interface:
- Companies must rebuild and recreate their existing functionality and branding for voice usage, requiring heavy investment in their chosen assistant, beit Alexa, Siri, or Google.
- User context is lost after a few commands, where thousands of skills compete for a broad set of commands from users.
- Many multi-step voice conversations on these devices aren’t purely voice enabled — users have to go back to using touch and type with several Siri and Google Assistant skills.
- Privacy and Security are lacking: employees from the big platform’s listen and expose user data to gain a competitive edge in Machine Learning technology. Companies don’t own the IP of what they create.
Demonstration of how developers will monetize their voice apps is also a problem. Currently the big platforms provide rewards to app developers based on their app’s monthly user engagement, as they build the market and find a way to long term monetization.
Enterprises are creating voice apps on these platforms with limited control of the experience, data, and technical investment. Despite this, voice is an important part of the future. The difficulties posed for enterprises will be eliminated. The future of voice is coming.