With the advent of technology, more business processes are getting automated, easily streamlined and getting efficient. Key to these rapid changes is artificial intelligence or machine learning where bots in programs now allows us to delegate manually redundant tasks to machines. Not only these but machines can now process complicated data and make intuitive projections and forecasts. Voice assistants are becoming commonplace in business environments. Voice enabled assistants can help set appointments, read books, make reminders and much more.
This technology uses voice queries and a natural-language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of Internet services. Depending on what your business is or your devices, voice assistant trends indicate there is a solution for you.
Growth of Voice Assistants
As far as favorites go Apple’s Siri seems to be the most used voice assistant in the market accounting for 48% of all Voice assistant users. Google Assistant (29%) and Amazon’s Alexa (10%) follow as the favorite voice assistants in today’s market.
Spurned by the relative ease to communicate using voice, voice assistants are making the experience of making the simple task of querying more personal. In fact, 84% of users use voice assistants to make queries. This is followed by taking traffic directions or reports (71%) and calling someone. In terms of business 56% use voice assistant to find places to eat while 42% use it to research a product before buying it.
A monthly breakdown of voice assistants by user all shows seeking answers to general questions is ranked at the topmost use of voice assistants. This is followed by traffic directions (47%) and calling (44%).
Like any machine learning process, voice assistants become better the more you use them. Through recording your voice trends and learning from their mistakes, they can create intuitive predictions based on the patterns of requests they get. Even though there are improvements consumers still feel voice assistants can do better, with 44% wanting to see better speech recognition. Others would like to see improvement in natural language understanding and search accuracy.
Voice assistants are intuitive. They do this by understanding human speech and responding in a way that makes users feel like they’re having a conversation with another person.
Benefits of Voice Assistants
Voice assistants are Artificial Intelligence based digital tools that listen for commands, interpret them, and take action. Their applications in the workplace can provide businesses with various ways to improve efficiency and productivity.
In an exclusive interview with Piyush Goel, CEO of BeyondKey, Small Business Trends asked, “How are businesses using voice and how is it helping them?”
Goel says, “The answer varies widely based on companies’ specific needs. Some companies integrate voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home answering capabilities with business data to trigger core business activities; while other businesses find value in using voice to initiate a call, email, or text faster than it would take to type.”
Adding, “Every business will have specific needs for using voice technology. Our job is to integrate those needs to help them achieve their objectives.”
Internal Productivity
Voice assistants like Cortana and Siri can be very helpful in analyzing data. Businesses can use voice assistants for task tracking, as well as time management. You can use voice commands to build analytical queries over large data stores helping you to easily crunch data thus saving you valuable time.
For example, Siri can help you analyze data by using voice commands. You can help build analytical queries over large data trove, dividing data by date ranges or functions by simply using your voice. Voice assistants also help you not only interpret the data but also provide visualization as well.
“One way we use Voice AI specifically at Beyond Key is through automatically recorded Zoom meetings. These recordings are then transcribed, speakers identified, minutes tagged, and keywords flagged. The entire transcription becomes searchable, so you can find any action items”, added Goel on the tasks voice assistants are already making.
Advanced voice assistants are also changing the way we do business. They can now help employees use voice commands to make service requests. They are then transformed into service tickets that are addressed by support staff. This helps expedites the processing of requests and putting job orders in the system with little effort. It can be handy for businesses working in food and beverages, supplies, cleaning or maintenance.
Customer Service
Voice assistants are now a viable tool for supporting customer service. They can help optimize your customer experience by responding to queries, following up on orders or processing payments. This is especially useful for small businesses with few employees.
Another benefit of using a voice assistant is they don’t need to take breaks. This means you can make your business available 24/7 to answer customer queries, set appointments and other tasks specific to your business.
Beyond helping your customers, a voice assistant can also be your personal assistant. Don’t have a secretary, don’t worry you can program your assistant to answer calls, make appointments, take messages and more.
Marketing to Reach New Customers
Voice searches often lead to more calls to follow through on queries. These calls to businesses can convert to ten or fifteen times more revenues than web leads. Call converts also afford speed in the processing stages with calls converting 30% faster than web leads. Compared to web leads call retention rates are 28% higher as well.
By 2023 voice commerce is projected to grow to $80 billion, which is up by $78 billion from 2018’s $2 billion. This is due to the growing demand and interest in voice deals and sales and promotion (52%) and the proliferation of smart speaker purchases (11.5%).
Amazon’s Alexa and OK Google provide interaction with additional third-party content and services. Such as help in ordering takeout food, request an Uber ride or even play a song from a streaming service.
How Do You Take advantage of Google, Alexa, Siri?
“Voice technology is disrupting businesses because of their ability to help companies accomplish more. For example, e-commerce companies receive more voice orders, bloggers are dictating more content, and languages are easier than ever to translate”, said Goel.
Voice assistants can also be your very own personal assistant. They can help you manage your calendar, place phone calls, send follow up messages, and automate other tasks. These not only help boost productivity but also frees you to commit to high-level tasks that require your attention.
How to Use Voice Assistants?
In the coming years voice assistants will continue to bring enterprise solutions tackling a myriad of problems. The latest voice assistant trends show they can handle your social media profiles, create interactive experiences, boost search statistics, and more.
“Basic IT support will move from IT experts to voice assistants. Companies will save time that humans spend on small items like when an employee forgets to plug in a device or doesn’t know how to print”, said Goel.
HR Support
Voice assistance is great for planning. With them, your HR operations will see more ease in doing business as they can help you check on vacation policies, track attendance, and order supplies.
With voice assistants HR departments no longer need to take all phone calls from job-seekers and manually create profiles of candidates. Voice assistants can now help fill in the necessary information with ease. They allow you to easily juggle multiple tasks and provide quick answers to common problems. Depending on your particular needs, voice assistants can provide your business with personalized solutions.
Streamlining Operations
Another business benefit is voice assistants can help streamline operations. They achieve this by using AI and deep learning to access reports, analyzing data and keeping crucial systems updated.
This helps in integrating your operations thus avoiding the headaches of trying to integrate across platforms.
Planning and Communicating
Voice assistants can take on the responsibility of remembering important dates, deadlines, and scheduling. These will help you in your planning and execution of tasks. With voice assistants taking care of the mundane tasks of reminding and tracking projects you drive innovation and decrease your costs.
The key to any success in business besides have a great product or service lies in your competitive edge. Incorporating technology into your operation will help you improve your process, cut costs, save time and get a leg up against the competition.
Voice assistants are easy to incorporate into your business process irrespective of the size and type of business. There are multiple solutions to any business problem. Like any tool, you will need to understand the needs of your organization. This includes how to incorporate it and how to seamlessly integrate it into your organization.
Improving your knowledge of trends may help a business understand the potential of new technology to help it in executing its strategies and identify opportunities.
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