We conducted extensive research to better understand consumer usage and perception of voice assistants. We know adoption is increasing, but voice assistants are still being used largely for basic tasks. Why is this?
Voice assistants are funnier than we give them credit for
When forced to choose, 57% of consumers said they would rather watch an ad in the middle of a TV show than listen to an ad spoken by their voice assistant. To make advertising more enticing for the latter, consumers agree they would be open to listening to ads through their voice assistant if:
93% of consumers are satisfied with their voice assistants; 50%, very satisfied. Voice assistants help people feel organized (50% agree), informed (45%), happy (37%), smart (35%), confident (31%), and free (30%).
The average consumer is using their voice assistant more than they were before, and will use it even more in the future. Differences can be seen, however, among the youngest consumers we surveyed (18-24-year olds) and usage with smartphone voice assistants, with both groups exhibiting significantly less usage as time goes on.
While mainstream voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home have been carving out a significant share of the smart speaker market, an equal market has been created for voice-first technology that eschews the major tech companies in favor of a more private, data-secure approach. Kansas City-based Mycroft successfully crowdfunded more than $1 million from over 1,500 investors to deliver Mycroft AI, an open voice ecosystem which differentiates itself with a localized, secure architecture that avoids sending data back to Silicon Valley tech giants.
Virtual assistants such as Apple Siri live in smartphones, tablets, and laptops, or in stationary devices like Amazon Echo or Google Home smart speakers. People use them to turn music on and off, check weather forecasts, adjust room temperature, order goods online, and do many other things.
The system is unable to differentiate people by voice, the show hosts explained, which means Alexa will follow the orders of anybody who is around. As a result, little kids started making unplanned online purchases, not knowing the difference between asking their parents to give them a snack and asking Alexa to give them a toy.
When my aging parents and in-laws visit my home, it has become routine for them to use their voice to turn on lights or watch TV. Both sides of parents are immigrants from Italy and Yugoslavia, and although their heavily accented voice commands are comedy gold, they work flawlessly.
Fast forward to over a year since our launch and applying our research, and the behavioral data from the vast number of Palm devices out in the wild is eye-opening. On average, customers use voice assistants five times more than a standard Android smartphone, take 30% more photos and listen to two times more music than average. What's just as interesting is what customers do far less: They spend 50% less time on social media and 84% less time on long-form consumption, and they perform 40% less email and work-related tasks on their smartphones.
To dig deeper into the characteristics of the relationship that participants want to have with their digital assistant, we also asked them to imagine a real-life character to represent the chatbot or voice assistant. The character could be a real person (like a friend), a character from media, books, or cartoons, or a celebrity. When some had trouble coming up with a specific name, they were told that the focus was on why the person would make a good candidate for the job, not who she/he is.
While people themselves are not consistent, they do expect consistency in the personality of their digital assistants. A digital assistant, whether over voice or text, is a channel after all; establishing a consistent brand experience across channels is important for building customer trust and loyalty. When asked to rank order the must-have personality traits for each industry, we found consistency in user expectations by industry.
My kids are obsessed with talking to home voice assistants. Not a day goes by where you won't hear either my seven-year-old or three-year-old ask Alexa or Google what the weather currently is, to play their favorite songs, or the answer to some random question about wildlife. I'm sure many parents can relate.
In case you haven't been to a Disney theme park in the past decade, the MagicBand is basically a watch-sized wearable device that enables you to quickly enter the parks, skip the lines with Disney's new FastPass system called Genie+, and more. It's basically your big ticket to Disneyland and Disney World. There's a premium version of the wearable called MagicBand+ that does all of the same things but includes interactive capabilities. For example, the MagicBand+ will light up when you pass certain statues at Magic Kingdom and when you tap the device, a voice of the character from the statue will interact with you.
Hey Disney actually first rolled out late last year at select Walt Disney World resorts, like Disney's Polynesian Village. (According to Disney, the company is aiming to eventually roll the voice assistant out to every guest staying in a Disneyland or Disney World resort.) However, the voice assistant found at the resorts is a bit different than the upcoming home version as it's focused on answering park questions for Disney guests. And until this week, the only place you could try Hey Disney out was at these select Disney resorts.
I don't know which dating site u met this General on, but be aware that I have been sent 2-3 friend requests on Tango with this same name. They continuously keep changing his picture. I have never accepted his friend request. Unfortunately I recently fell victim to a romance scam online. These guys say the most beautiful things n tell u they love adore n want to spend the rest of their lives with you. Please don't buy it. They are scammers that do not care about u whatsoever. They will ask u for money. Most of them pose as widowed engineers with a child. They claim to be successful. What a joke. The name of the person who scammed for a little bit of money is name Patrick Nguyen. Not his real name. They will ask u to open bank accts n give them the username password n Q&As. They will try to transfer money into this acct, with ur name on it, via check. Rubber checks that is. Thank God my bank caught the check which had been altered. I called him out on it. Sure he scammed me for money but in the interim I learned a very valuable lesson. He will get u into serious bank fraud problems.
In the U.S., millennials are the children of baby boomers, who are also known as the Me Generation, who then produced the Me Me Me Generation, whose selfishness technology has only exacerbated. Whereas in the 1950s families displayed a wedding photo, a school photo and maybe a military photo in their homes, the average middle-class American family today walks amid 85 pictures of themselves and their pets. Millennials have come of age in the era of the quantified self, recording their daily steps on FitBit, their whereabouts every hour of every day on PlaceMe and their genetic data on 23 and Me. They have less civic engagement and lower political participation than any previous group. This is a generation that would have made Walt Whitman wonder if maybe they should try singing a song of someone else.
Currently, more than a quarter (27 percent) of the global online population is using the voice search feature on their mobile devices. (GlobalWebIndex, 2018) Usage is particularly popular among the 16-to-34 age bracket, with two-thirds of mobile voice search users falling into this particular age group.
Of all the gadgets available that offer voice-assisted search functions, smartphones appear to be the leading device of choice for voice search users. More than 90 percent of consumers report having used their smartphones to carry out voice searches, compared to less than half on their smart speakers and just over four in ten through in-car voice assistants.
According to a survey conducted by Adobe, the top task given to voice assistants by users is to play music, with around three in four (74 percent) users doing so (Adobe, 2019). This is a four percentage point increase from the previous year.
For instance, just 11 percent of consumers task their voice assistants with planning their travels by researching hotels or flights. This number falls further to just five percent for finance management.
Continuing with the entertainment track, I tried to use the assistants to order movie tickets for Avengers: Endgame, which ended up being far more work on any of the platforms than using a good old-fashioned web browser. Alexa offered the Atom Tickets skill, which was slow and a bit cumbersome; the skill kicked me back out when I had to authorize the use of Amazon Pay but at least when I resumed later, Atom Tickets let me pick up where I left off, plus it can handle theaters with reserved seating.
Buying things using your voice seems like it should be a good feature, but in practice, it still feels cumbersome. Alexa should have the advantage here, thanks to its tight integration with Amazon. By default, Alexa seems to handle most purchase requests by searching the Amazon catalog for something matching the query, then adding that to your Amazon cart, which can have unintended results.
Google's Voice Match is the most sophisticated of these approaches, offering personalized calendars, flights, payments, photos and more; you can even set your own default media services. However, I have not infrequently encountered problems with it recognizing my voice and refusing to give me access to my information until I've retrained my Voice Match. Alexa, meanwhile, currently offers only personalized shopping, calling and some media options.
In our final counts, Google Assistant and Alexa tied for the most total points, but Google narrowly edged out Alexa in the number of first-place finishes. Siri, meanwhile, landed in third place in both measurements, though it was only slightly behind on total points. Overall, all of the virtual assistants were more capable than in previous editions of our shootout, revealing improvements across the industry. 2ff7e9595c
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