As noted by Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2017) voice recognition is still from perfect, but millions of people are now using it. The first smart speaker, which uses voice recognition, was launched by Amazon in the US in 2014. Nowadays they lead the category with 71.9% of the market share (Ipsos, 2018). I am using the technology as well – the Google Assistant on my iPhone. It helps me to put Netflix on pause or to turn off or on the lights. No doubt that I will further automate my house. That it is still form perfect is easy to detect while using the speech recognition technology. For example, the Dutch version does not recognize English words properly, such as the word Elite that is recognized as ‘een lied’ – a song in Dutch.
The expectations are high. Gartner estimates that 30% of our interactions with technology will be through conversations with smart machines by the end of this year (Forbes, 2018). PWC (2018) found in their study that 50% of respondents have made a purchase using their voice assistant. The majority of items purchased were small and quick and are things that someone could buy without necessarily having to see it physically. What I am wondering is if voice assistants will influences the purchase behavior of customers and in what way? According to the long tail theory our economy is shifting towards the selling of high number of different items which each sells at a relatively small amount, usually in addition to a small number of popular items sold in large quantities. My thoughts are that the amount of differentiated products will decline with the use of voice recognition, whereas it will be hard to explain exactly what type of product you want to buy – fulfilling the customers’ needs becomes more important. What do you expect? Will the tail get smaller?
Brynjolfsson, E. & McAfee A. (2017) The business of artificial intelligence. What it can – and cannot – do for your organization. Harvard Business Review.
Forbes (2018)Â https://www.google.nl/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2018/08/22/voice-interface-technology-the-future-of-business/amp/
Ipsos (2018) https://www.ipsos.com/en-nl/future-voice-assistants-netherlands
