What we learned during our work with voice are four steps that help voice assistants fly.
Just speak out a wish and it will be fulfilled. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Voice assistants could be THE solution, they are the best, most natural way of bridging the interface between people and devices.
But have Voice Assistants which have been around for 10 years lived up to the expectations for mass adoption? To be honest the user experience of voice assistants leaves room to improve. The challenges include
- Voice assistants expect commands in a certain vocabulary which sometimes do not correspond to natural language usage.
- Problems for the assistant to understand people with high voices or a strong accent, especially in a noisy environment.
- Assistants confuse customers with an exponentially growing number of features and rather weak customer experience .
- Customer expectation of assistants being free to use and being embedded in phones, cars, TVs, etc.
These challenges got us thinking - is there really a flywheel for a 10X growth for voice assistants? To answer this question, we need to investigate how to turn each of the challenges into opportunities to start building momentum.
Step 1: Invest in high quality features
Voice assistant providers seam to focus more on quantity rather than quality. Hundreds of thousands of voice use-cases confuses our customers more than they are seen to be helpful. It is essential to convince users with examples like these: search for "episodes in Friends with Brad Pitt" with only one voice command, rather than zapping through or switching to another device for search. Deliver best experience for our services to turn our customers to fans.
Step 2: Bring voice to many free to use touch points
Customers don’t want to pay for using a voice assistant and don’t want to buy an extra device. They expect the voice experience to be embedded into the core products like mobile phones, wearables, cars, etc. they already have. Hence, we need to bring the voice assistant on as many free to use touch points as possible to gain acceptance of customers and boost usage.
Step 3: Create massive awareness
Voice assistants are quite bad at selling themselves. The best way to educate the customers are “in-the-moment recommendations” about features and how to use them. While your customer is habitually zapping channels using the remote control, you could show a tip saying, “Hey did you know that you could just push the voice button and search for your favorites via voice?”.
Step 4: Gaining acceptance with customers and business
Investing into voice could create a positive impact on the experience of millions of additional customers. If our business partners want to offer their customers, the same excellent Voice experience, we can support them with our Telekom voicification suite. Business use cases like our scheduling bot or our verification bot are highly sought after in the market. With this additional traffic on our platform, we are able to scale and reduce the cost for all our stakeholders.
The flywheel will start to fly on its own once customer and business adoption is reached through massive scale and/or positive financial impact.
Deutsche Telekom has embarked on the Magenta Voice assistant journey to delight millions of customers with an easy-to-use interface for interacting with Telekom services – their voice. Convince yourself of our Voice assistant with Magenta TV, be surprised about the already available touchpoints and stay curious how we create awareness for our customers. If you are curious how we can help you, as a business to offer your customers an impeccable voice experience, check out voice.telekom.com.
