Voice assistants in an emerging market
In February 2010, a mobile app called Siri was introduced to Apple iPhone and IPad users. Apple acquired the software the following year and integrated it with subsequent versions of its mobile and desktop products. Thus the journey of a new service called voice assistants began.
Amazon responded to the release of Siri by launching a voice assistant called Alexa in November 2014, Google came up with Google Home in November 2016, and Microsoft launched Cortana in May 2015. Several other technology companies have also introduced their own voice assistant products which have recorded varied popularity. Today, developed countries like the US have an identifiable product market of voice assistant devices and software.
As voice assistants are software, they can be downloaded and used on smartphones, wearable devices, and tablets. According to a survey conducted by PwC in February 2018, among 1,000 American users, 90 percent are aware about the presence and capabilities of voice assistants in the devices they use. However, three out of four use it only at home. Such usage may be driven by the specialised devices built for home environments such as a living room.
A voice assistant can perform tasks ranging from searching the internet to controlling electronic appliances. Its capabilities are growing rapidly and more machines are becoming interoperable with voice assistants. However, users still prefer to use voice assistants to perform basic tasks like searching the internet or playing music. With the comfort of usage increasing, we will see its use in performing relatively complex tasks in the future.
Trust remains a matter of concern while using voice assistants. A good number of users are wary about providing financial information like credit card data to voice assistants. Many shoppers limit their use of voice assistants to perform basic shopping only, such as buying a detergent powder. However, when it comes to shopping for, say a sweater, most shoppers rely on e-commerce website instead of voice assistants to shop for them.
The other growing concern is voice assistants' ability to listen to conversations in the home of users and use information from those conversations subsequently. A majority of users have got accustomed to seeing advertisements of a particular product when they search for similar products on the internet. However, they are not used to receiving an advertisement or a promotional offer of a product while discussing similar things among family members within their homes. Such personalised behaviours of voice assistants surprise many users in a negative way and erode the overall trust in voice assistants.
Creating a market for voice assistants requires a good amount of effort in building the ecosystem for that country and community. For example, playing music for an American user in America would require the creation of an inventory of English music of different genres. However, the same is unlikely to work for users in Bangladesh. That makes the marketing of a voice assistant local instead of global. Some of these products have been launched in India and their product ecosystem is developing. However, their plan to do the same for Bangladesh market are not yet known.
American households having annual income higher than $100,000 are driving the sales of voice assistants today, making it a product for the upper middleclass population. The same is visible in emerging countries like Bangladesh too. Today, only a few high-income households of Bangladesh have voice assistants installed in their houses. Most of them are used for entertainment only, such as playing music.
Beyond providing entertainment and ease of use, voice assistants have a big role to play in the world of digital accessibility. Computers and smartphones used today provide little facility to users with physical challenges such as blindness and colour blindness. Voice assistants are capable of including such group of individuals into the digital world. A blind person or a person incapable of using hands for typing would find voice assistants as an enabler to use computers, smartphones, and other electronic devices. Building proper awareness and useful integration with digital transformation programmes will increase the utility of voice assistants manifold.
In fact, cost-effective voice assistants may become an integral part of the Digital Bangladesh Vision. More than 800,000 people in Bangladesh suffer from blindness, according to various healthcare studies. A similar number of individuals would have other physical challenges that would limit their ability to use standard computerised systems. Enabling them with the right kind of voice assistants would drive digital inclusion further.
Private enterprises may also look into the role of voice assistants for enhancing efficiency and improving workplace accessibility. A lot of companies in Bangladesh today have embarked on their journey of digitalisation. They are implementing enterprise applications to digitalise their value chains. In most cases, workers have to input data into the system by using computers while their actual jobs require them to use some other tools. An integrated voice assistant would help them provide inputs into the enterprise applications without spending time in reaching out to a computer and typing in the inputs. While such arrangements require deeper business vision and higher digital maturity, the business leaders must start thinking about such possibilities using this technology.
Bangladesh is yet to emerge as a market for the voice assistants. However, there is ample scope to adopt it to accelerate economic growth and digital inclusion.
The writer is partner at PwC. The views expressed here are personal.