Rather than typing a message or searching for something online, why not just speak it into your phone?

Voice recognition is already a major function that’s revolutionizing the way people use their devices. With Amazon Alexa, you can look up a recipe while you grease a cooking sheet across the kitchen. Using Google Assistant, just squeeze the sides of your phone and ask it to find movie times closest to your location. Its present capabilities are already cutting-edge, to say the least, and as the years roll on, opportunities for voice recognition in the future are poised to make our lives even easier. 

Still skeptical of voice recognition services? That’s okay, a lot of folks are. Before you set up an Alexa in your kitchen, here’s a quick rundown on the impact voice rec is having across society, within companies, and beyond. 

Voice Recognition Already Makes a Huge Impact on Society

According to research from ComScore, 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches by the year 2020. 

If you haven’t put that together, that’s less than one year from now! Of course, voice recognition capabilities have been steadily growing since the 1950s, but 2019 has led to a rapid influx for the voice recognition market. In fact, a report from Technavio claims that already in this year, the voice recognition industry has grown to be worth over $600 million. Not to mention, once again by 2020, there will be 21.4 million active smart speakers in the U.S. alone. Other parts of the world are starting to catch on, too, but America still dominates the market. 

For instance, in 2017, the UK and U.S. combined only generated $2 billion in total voice commerce sales. However, projections for 2022 show that the U.K. will increase its revenue to $5 billion, whereas the U.S. will land upwards of $40 billion. Needless to say, e-commerce companies and brands everywhere are taking notice and ramping up efforts to accommodate the shifting, global landscape of voice searches. And on that note, Alexa, order some toilet paper for the office, please! 

How Companies Around the World are Using Voice Recognition

Even though aspirations for the future are bright, companies around the world have already built some pretty incredible uses for voice rec. 

To give you some insight, here are 3 stellar brands taking advantage of voice recognition in noteworthy ways:

1. Starbucks

Gone are the days ordering from your dumb keyboard, and instead, Starbucks integrates its popular ordering app to work with Amazon Alexa and Bixby, allowing customers to order coffee through voice commands. 

Rather than going inside to pick up an order, coffee-lovers everywhere order a cup of Joe during their morning commute, swoop into a Starbucks drive-through and pick up their beverage. Ordering and payment already complete through the app and their account. Coffee made simple. 

2. BevMo!

To help customers decide what whiskey to buy, BevMo!, an alcohol retailer based in California, designed an entire “smart shelf” run by chatbots to narrow down a customer’s choice to three selections based on their responses. 

Essentially, a customer walks up to the shelf and the chatbot engages with them via a sensor. It asks a series of questions, and once a determination has been made, lights on the shelf blink to direct the customer to what items to consider. Unfortunately, BevMo! isn’t sure if the process leads to more sales or better customer experience, but it collects data either way, which is useful for a variety of marketing efforts. 

3. TuneIn 

One of the most popular features that users rely on when using smart speakers is listening to podcasts. Over time, advertisers realized this but didn’t have a way to market to a new audience using new tech. 

Luckily, TuneIn Radio, a popular streaming service, recognized the problem and started selling 90-second ad spaces to companies, helping them craft their own smart-speaker ads to connect to new demographics. Moving forward, the company plans to develop ads with greater intuition, even going so far as to prompt listeners to respond to ads to gain conversions or possible leads. 

These are just a few of the companies launching new campaigns backed by voice rec to target customers in a savvier way. And it’s only a matter of time until advanced voice recognition strategies make their way into our daily lives.

Know of another company using voice recognition in an innovative way? We want to hear, please tell us about them in the comments.

Voice Recognition and Voice Search Optimization are Shaping the Future

In a quote from Tyler Shulze, the VP of strategy and development at Veritone, Inc., he imagines that the next ten years of voice recognition technology will bring some astounding insights:

“Machines will have the ability to identify virtually any human being worldwide by their spoken voice, in real-time. Public and private entities already correlate voice recordings and personal profiles programmatically from existing stores of data such as customer service calls, voicemail recordings, and personal videos distributed via social media.” 

With that in mind, voice recognition is shaping the future through data collection. The more data an entity has, the better they can tailor campaigns and anticipate customer habits, leading them to manipulate decisions and drive conversions. 

In addition to voice recognition as a whole, voice search optimization plays entirely into this concept. Research from Google claims that 20% of all searches are coming from voice searches. In addition, 71% of mobile users between 18-29 use voice assistants on a daily basis. In terms of SEO rankings and gaining listeners, businesses have to focus on making their content conversational and friendly to promote casual keyword association and voice search relevance.

AI chatbots are another resource gaining a ton of traction for future consumers. A recent study by Juniper Networks shows that by 2023, retailers can lower costs by up to $439 billion while increasing profits by $112 billion just by using Chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) responses. Altogether, a chatbot that filters through content and provides customers with answers and insights for basic inquiries streamlines tedious customer service issues and gains dedicated followers. 

Voice Recognition is on the Rise, but Transcription will Always be Vital

Someday technology may get to a point where voice recognition automatically establishes clean and clear audio transcription but transforming audio files to legible text will always be vital. 

The reason for this is that everyone’s voice patterns and overall speech are unique. Accumulating that much user data and bits of speech to account for a full-fledged rendering of someone’s tone and inflection on words may take a lifetime. On the other hand, Rev offers an automated transcription service that converts audio to text through the use of innovative speech recognition algorithms.

For only $0.10 per audio minute, businesses can transform their podcast into a blog post or create quotes from a conversation to post on social media. Regardless of what your profession is or what the reasons may be, you can have affordable and accurate transcriptions in no time. More importantly, you can align yourself with future voice practices so that when big changes arise, you’re already on the same page.