Voice technology will be huge in 2019, with smart speakers driving this revolution. Let’s look at some of the key ways voice can boost marketing activity and engage audiences

A bit of background

Voice technology uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI to provide a more intuitive way of interacting with devices including smart speakers. Although the underlying technology has been in development for decades, it is only with recent advances in computing that it has been practical and reliable. Now let’s take a brief look at the main smart speaker platforms. [si_guide_block id="70611" title="Download our Free Resource – Essential digital marketing tools" description="This guide gives Free members a preview of the 30 categories of digital marketing tools you should be using for your marketing."/]

Amazon Alexa

Currently the most popular smart speakers with global sales of 100 million devices. Alexa technology is available in a wide range of devices from the entry level Echo Dot through…

Chart of the Day: What emerging behaviours are consumers showing as they interact with digital assistants and what are the implications for marketers?

At the moment the physical and virtual papers are full of reviews and consumer experiences of the different options for home smart speakers. It's no surprise, since this is one of the biggest trends in tech, with 50+ million voice assistants due to ship in 2018 as I showed in my last article on smart speaker forecasts. We're also seeing emerging research on how consumers are interacting with these speakers which is useful for marketers and brands who are working out how they can potentially interact with audiences. In this article, I share some of the latest consumer research from Google. Here is their research summary. I found the figure that 70% of queries to the Google Assistant are natural language since this shows the increasing importance of optimising…

Chart of the Day: Smart digital home assistants are the fastest-growing consumer tech with shipments to surpass 50 million in 2018

With many individuals and families starting 2018 with a new personal digital home assistant in their lives, this research highlights the likely future popularity of these new devices:

The research shows that in 2017, the Amazon Echo devices were the most popular, but with Google Home devices already accounting for around a quarter of sales; an impressive start since they weren't available throughout the year. The prediction considers all the available options from the more established Amazon Echo variants, Google Home assistants, plus Apple's anticipated Home Pod and the Microsoft phone. Although the report is titled 'smart speakers' this is a bit of misnomer since Amazon recently released the Amazon Echo Show which still has speakers true, but is an Echo with…