It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of operating devices by giving voice commands seemed like science fiction. But here we are in 2021, telling Alexa to play our favourite tune or asking Siri how to make our favourite dish without moving a finger. We get automated calls that are responsive and a voice guides us, helping navigate traffic as we drive. Voice – one of the earliest forms of communication – has once again taken the centre stage. Technology has opened up many new avenues with exciting voice tech innovations, revolutionising and democratising communication.
Globally, voice technology has taken a leap in the past decade. Be it IVR (interactive voice response) or speech recognition, businesses are making use of voice tech for marketing, sales as well as operations. In day-to-day life too the popularity of voice assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa has been remarkable. In fact, voice assistants became a great boon for people during the pandemic and helped deal with the isolation during lockdowns.
Business of talking
With voice tech evolving fast, more businesses are likely to thrive on voice commerce making voice engine optimisation and voice engine marketing the future of marketing. In fact, innovative campaigns using interactive voice technology, Alexa Skill, Google Action, voice SEO and audio advertising are already turning heads.
The Coca Cola “Say Yes to Coke No Sugar” campaign, for instance, was a fun way to offer a free taste of their latest product in Australia. Or imagine if AI could enable voice tech to do something like this Ocean’s talking tuna supermarket surprise.
Another out of the box use of voice tech is the Heineken’s “A Voice That Only You Can Hear” campaign. The beer brand gave customers a fun and unique buying experience, creating brand recall value. KFC India on the other hand made a foray into voice-first ordering by introducing KFC voicebot on Alexa to allow customers to order via the smart speaker. Indian FinTech brand PayTM also entered the field with voice-activated Sound Box allowing shopkeepers to keep track of payments.
As voice AI gets smarter by the day and technology replaces how we go about our daily life, issues related to privacy and data breach are also taking centre stage. But that’s a discussion for another blog.
India holds potential
The real promise of voice-tech is emerging in India. A surge in the use of smart phones and smart speakers, coupled with increased internet speeds makes India a very promising market. This is evident with Apple, Google and Amazon introducing Indian languages and accents. In fact, Google in 2019 revealed that Hindi was the second most common language for its Google Assistant globally, after English. The personality of Amazon’s voice assistant in Hindi is so enchanting, that close to 6,00,000 people have already proposed to Alexa – imagine that!
The true potential of voice tech, however, lies in its ability to reach people in the heart of the country. Since audio has no literacy barrier, it can reach the remotest of villages and enable communication at the grassroots. The adult literacy rate in India is 73.2%, meaning almost 370 million people are still illiterate. In areas of low literacy, voice tech can also prove to be an educational tool. Moreover, with 400 million existing feature phone users, mostly in isolated, rural areas, voice technology can play a crucial role in connecting and empowering them.
One such initiative connecting rural areas in Jharkhand and Bihar is the Mobile Vaani Network. A rural network that can be compared to grassroots social media, it uses an intelligent IVR system to allow people to make a free call into a number and leave a message about their community, or listen to messages left by others. This makes the technology accessible to everyone – those without phones or with access to only feature phones. This is the real democratisation of technology.
Voice Localisation
Given the expanse and diversity that defines India, vernacular holds the key. The real success of voice tech will depend on how voice platforms are able to adapt to the wide variety of dialects and accents across India. With 22 official local languages and thousands of dialects, the reality is quite complex. Developing an AI that ‘understands’ or can communicate in one language is difficult enough, let alone 100 languages or thousands of dialects. A great example of how voice localisation can help is a Marathi-medium school close to Nagpur that is using voice assistants for education. In this school Alexa has been fitted inside a mannequin dressed as a teacher to help teach students.
What is encouraging is that several brands are lending support and making a foray into voice tech driven initiatives at the grassroots. Pocket Dentist is a Colgate advice line developed with the Indian Dental Association for media dark regions where there is only one dentist per 50,000 people. By simply giving a missed call, people get a call back and a voice recognition system, fed with 30 commonly asked questions, responds to oral hygiene queries.
Another innovative campaign is the Lifebuoy Infection Alert System. Using live government data about 21 communicable diseases from 34,000 rural community health centres across 822 villages, the system triggered an automatic calling system when infection reaches a certain number in a locality. The best part, it alerts people in their local language, reminding them to take precautions such as washing hands regularly. While these are great customer engagement campaigns, they are few and still in early stages.
One thing is clear, the future belongs to voice tech. The customer of the future is likely to be more comfortable speaking to a device in his own language and dialect rather than typing and voice tech companies need to take this opportunity to tap the market early. Big brands too should seize the opportunity to literally speak with the customers in their language. India might currently be a big ‘video first’ internet market but looking at the increase in voice technology usage, it has the potential to become one of the biggest ‘voice first’ internet markets.
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