Yes, Voice tech has problems. Yes.
For better or for worse, I’m intimately familiar with them. As the first Google product marketer for the Google Assistant, these were the challenges keeping me up many nights in my SF apartment in 2015 and 2016. They are problems that, as a founder of the voice tech startup Maslo, kept us from securing funding and customers in 2017 and 2018. And they are ecosystem-wide problems that, as a BD lead for Headspace today, dominate my conversations internally and out.
Call them problems, or call them massive opportunities. These are the potholes, dirt paths and bridge-less cliffs that critics criticize, investors invest in, and founders start startups to solve. We need creative solutions in these areas, and I for one, am bullish that we’ll find them.
Amazon and Google alone have over 12,000 employees combined working on Alexa and Google Assistant-related initiatives. Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and countless startups are all invested in making voice tech work. If knowing that 8 of the most influential tech companies in the world today are invested in solving these challenges doesn’t seed some doubt in a bearish mind, I’m not sure what will.
At VoicePunch, we believe in the voice tech ecosystem. That’s what makes us clear-eyed on the problems, because those who solve them have opportunity for serious relevancy. These are the top 8 challenges for voice tech today, and ones we’re looking for creative solutions to impact.
1. Discoverability
Problem: how do you know what to tell Alexa? How do you know which of your favorite apps have skills on Alexa? Is the Google Assistant even available in your country or language? Did you even know this site exists? As a business, how can you justify building for voice platforms when you don’t have a model to guarantee your customers will find and adopt your product, let alone pay for it?
Opportunity: What are new ways to learn what’s available on consumer voice platforms? What are those enterprise voice solutions that are so specific they don’t face an awareness problem in the first place? Let’s fix voice tech’s version of SEO in a way that is helpful for consumers and equal for developers. And let’s find ways to track and optimize it all.
2. Monetization
Problem: What’s the last app you paid for? Do you even remember? The App Stores (Google and Apple namely) have generated billions of dollars for themselves and for developers, but they have also normalized your ability as a consumer to download and use incredibly sophisticated tech software for free. Only later do we complain societally about the ads within them, or their seeming addictiveness, which are necessary byproducts of having been made available for free in the first place. If businesses and entrepreneurs can’t find reliable income streams from voice platforms, the best brands and founders won’t invest in building for them. And if that’s the case, those platforms won’t be very successful long-term.
Opportunity: How do voice tech developers get paid for the work they do building voice software? Amazon and Google are working on how to get consumer payments on their platforms, but will they fix it?
3. Branding
Problem: What do Amazon, Google, or Apple sound like? You might answer, ‘well, they sound like Alexa, whoever the Google voice is, and Siri, duh!’. For voice platforms that have created their own voices, things look rosy. But what does Target do? Do you, as a consumer, care to remember what Best Buy sounds like? No. Even if you do have a branded persona, like Progressive’s Flo, how do you make Flo available in German, Japanese, or Chinese if you’re expanding to those markets? You can’t, because she’s a real human and doesn’t speak all the world’s languages. Combined, these points have real implications for brands.
Opportunity: Amazon and Google don’t really care about this one, because it’s easier for them to connect consumers with their demands bypassing brand altogether. But it’s especially important for media content providers, for IP reasons. Does this mean new-age jingles and sonic branding are coming back? Maybe, yes! Brands need to plant an audio memory in your mind and associate it to a name to create brand equity. We can all learn from DJ Khaled here — his pre-song cry “another one!” might be a gold-standard branding move in disguise.
4. Consumer Choice
Problem: Are you an Uber or Lyft person? Postmates or GrubHub? NYTimes or Fox? When you want to call a car, order dinner, or get the day’s news, do you really care? Maybe yes, maybe no. Alexa and the Google Assistant claim to make things simpler by learning about you, by remembering your preference and feeding it to you next time without asking. While that might be convenient, it has implications. Spotify has changed my familiarity with music artists, their songs, and the experience of listening to music as a whole. How will the simplification of the voice ecosystem change our understanding of new reels of businesses that provide content and services?
Opportunity: Convenience is important, but competition and choice is imperative for the wonders of capitalist business to work. How will voice platforms avoid kingmaking ability while keeping things simple for users? How will the regulatory powers that be attempt to curtail this dominant positioning to prevent it from using market power to sway consumers in their own self-interested ways?
5. Notifications
Problem: Oh those pesky things. As a smartphone user, you might hate them, but as a business, you love/hate them. For app businesses, notifications are incredibly valuable ways to re-engage folks who forgot about your app brand or product. Done well, notifications enable brands to communicate with their users at the right times to bring them back into the fold. How does this work on voice platforms? Say you try playing the game Heads Up with your family one night. Do you really want your Alexa notifying you in your home to play Heads Up again next Saturday? Not really (no offense to the devs at Heads Up). And once you forget about it, there’s no visual trace you ever played it. For the brand, that means it’s not a viable business if it can’t re-engage you as a customer.
Opportunity: How do businesses remind users they exist and provide valuable services while still respecting user solace?
6. Our Own Attitudes
Problem: Face it: we don’t have a firm way to control what Alexa or Google hears, so any attempt at interfacing with them “correctly” is preposterous when we don’t understand their intellectual abilities.
Opportunity: We need to be willing to mess up when interacting with voice tech products, otherwise we won’t use them. There’s no backspace to hit when we’ve said the wrong thing, no blinking cursor to alert us to our place. We’ll remain mute and stuck until we habitually employ our creativity and curiosity to navigate these new products. If you’re not willing to, that’s cool. Just learn it from the kids.
7. Kids
Problem: It’s a known fact: kids and teens talk to voice tech like it’s NBD and intuitively learn ways to use it that stuns us adults who probably bought the devices for them in the first place. Younger users are in fact adopting voice tech at a faster rate than adults, but they don’t use it as much. For kids, it’s much more important to address point #8 below: how do we add real value to kids as they grow up, rather than distract them from things that are critically important for them as humans in whatever developmental stage they’re in?
Opportunity: This one’s inevitable — the kids who are growing up now speaking to voice tech without hesitating — they will grow up, bring their habits with them, and probably even build the technology of the future. So for us cautious adults, that weird feeling we may have speaking to voice tech for the first time? We can get over it, or we can age out of relevancy, it doesn’t really matter long term.
8. Real Value
So, what are the killer use cases that make Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant must-haves for more than the early adopter market? Today, these devices are still young, and they need to mature by solving the issues before the ecosystem as a whole can parallel what we’ve seen with the mobile app ecosystem. There need to be viable business models to allow designers, developers and businesspeople alike to create use cases on them that wow, solve real world problems, and make money.
So what’s next?
Whether you’re an investor, founder, bypasser, journalist, developer, partner manager tangential to voice tech — the success or flop of this ecosystem impacts us all. So what do you think? Are these problems or opportunities? I for one, would love for you to point out any potholes and cliffs in our thinking.
Are you a startup working on solving one of the areas above? Reach out.
Do you know a startup solving one of these 8 issues? Register them here.
Just want to talk about it? Let’s.
