Your Voice is my command

Sunder Pichai’s fascinating video at the 2018 I/O keynote address, standing before a teeming crowd to demonstrate the first fully-functional interactive voice assistant. His claim: A bot voice that sounds so naturally human as to be indistinguishable. He has the crowd, but he will lose more than just their attention if his words are proved empty.

The task is simple – Google Assistant has to make a telephonic appointment for a haircut, as you, live at the event. The crowd lets out astonished cheers, hushed and waiting. In the next minute, Google Duplex starts a conversation with the receptionist at the hairstyling salon. The robot sounds uncannily human, with ‘umms’ and ‘ahs’ in the right places, modifying the request when the 12 PM slot needed is unavailable. A booking is made for 10 AM. The woman knows nothing of what just happened – she just made a haircut appointment with a robot.

Interactive voice assistance is like a sequel to the one-sided saga you conduct with your assistant, where you ask them to carry out tasks, but their speech responses are limited to the confirmation of your task. But with this stellar upgrade, the purpose changes. Your voice assistant will be able to do things you don’t have time for – haggling with your cable company on the phone or negotiating the price of stocks. We are predictably filled with cautious excitement as this technology carves into new territory.

Stats For Voice Assistance Usage

• In 2020, there were 4.2 billion digital voice assistants being used in devices around the world. Forecasts suggest that by 2024, the number of digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world’s population.
• One-third of enterprises will use conversational speech technology for customer engagement by 2022.
• 65% of smart speaker owners say they are comfortable making purchases with a smart speaker.
• 41% of people who own a voice-activated speaker say it feels like talking to a friend or another person, as per Google.
• In 2021, 68% of respondents said that their company currently has a voice strategy up from 18% in 2020. Of those that don’t, 60% said that is under consideration for sometime within the next 5 years.
• 85% of Amazon customers select the recommended Amazon product when voice shopping.
• While the Apple HomePod understands 99.4 percent of all queries, it only answers 52.3 percent correctly, putting it behind Amazon Echo (64%), Google Home (81%), and Harman Kardon Invoke (57%) in that regard, as per Loup Ventures.
• The voice recognition market is expected to grow at a yearly rate of 17.2% and to reach $26.8 billion by 2025.