There is a tremendous demand for voice AI all over the world, especially in the Indian market. In the post-pandemic world, the need for machines with touch-less UI is growing, and the voice AI comes across as the perfect solution, says Tapan Barman, Co-founder and CEO, Mihup

Voice AI technology is no longer a stranger to most of us, especially those with love for technology. Alexa manages devices in many homes today, and every single smartphone

has either Google Assistant or Siri waiting for the user’s commands. The advancement of voice AI has reached a level where we can talk to machines around us just the way we speak to another person. Many car companies are already offering embedded voice Assistants and others are set to follow the lead soon.

Research and market report pegged the current voice AI market at around US$ 100 billion and growing 15 percent YoY. There is a tremendous demand for voice AI all over the world, especially in the Indian market. In the post-pandemic world, the need for machines with touch-less UI is growing, and the voice AI comes across as the perfect solution. Many internet users are already using voice AI Assistants on their phones and devices to search for information, entertainment, music and commerce. As per a study by Adobe, 71 percent of American smart home speaker owners Claimed to use it daily while more than half used the speakers several times a day. According to brightlocal, 46 percent of voice AI users search for local businesses daily. In the digital world, the mantra for any business’s success is to meet the consumer where they want and when they want. That’s where companies that don’t integrate voice Assistants into their processes are likely to fall behind in the future.

At the backend, the AI-based conversational tools are software applications developed to automate natural language conversations. A company can use them as chat or voice assistants. A modern conversational AI system receives the user’s query through either written or spoken input. Then it offers the desired information with speed and accuracy similar to a regular conversation between humans. The existing tools are rooted in two major aspects: speech recognition and knowledge modelling.

Any voice AI Assistant’s efficiency, and accuracy will depend on its ability to comprehend the voice input correctly. This is where the first-generation voice AI tools had struggled as the American companies mostly produced them to understand the specific American accent. However, the modern voice assistants are becoming rapidly proficient in natural language processing as start-ups outside the US focus on creating phonetic based voice AI tools instead of those that rely on identifying words. The reliance on natural language processing and AI reduces the inaccuracies and empowers the voice assistants globally to deliver a more incredible experience to users worldwide. The market potential is huge, and with one of the largest populations on the planet, India offers great potential for companies using voice assistants.

There are many reasons why voice AI will be the future for business operations in the post-pandemic world. As we see already with many large companies, voice AI enables them to deploy automated round-the-clock customer service. The visitor engagement and traffic on websites and apps using such tools are usually higher as they can get relevant information in near real-time compared to the cumbersome process of contacting the sales team and seeking a response for their queries.

Voice AI is also playing a significant role in making customer service more efficient. They are taking up regular business communication and everyday customer service operations to free up precious human resources and focus on advanced tasks. When it comes to personalization and intuitive customer experience, the AI tools deliver excellent service in verticals such as sales, marketing, HR and others. Since the voice AI and chatbots store their conversations with the consumers, they also facilitate great insights into consumer behavior and expectations and improve their user experience. They can also generate leads and create products and services that are more likely to appeal to their consumers. While usage of consumer data to analyze and extract insights for the business is nothing new, the voice AI has transformational abilities in this arena. The analysis of speech-based data goes beyond typical data. It provides consumer feedback, but the tone, language patterns, and acoustics enable the systems to pick up consumer sentiments. Whether someone is agitated or happy, complaining or making suggestions or sharing positive feedback, it is acknowledged with greater clarity and impact with interaction analytics.

Thus, it is imperative for any company that envisions itself as a leading brand of the future to plan using AI voice assistant technology in its operations soon!

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Want to schedule an appointment? Just ask your phone. Need to turn on your bedroom lights? Google Home has you covered.

Now a $49 billion market, voice-activated systems have gained popularity among consumers, thanks to their ability to automate and streamline mundane tasks. But for people with impaired speech,  technologies that rely on voice commands have proved to be far from perfect.

That’s the impetus for Google’s newly formed Project Euphonia, part of the company’s AI for Social Good program. The project team is exploring ways to improve speech recognition for people who are deaf or have neurological conditions such as ALS, stroke, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis or traumatic brain injury.

Google has partnered with nonprofit organizations ALS Therapy Development Institute and ALS Residence Initiative (ALSRI) to collect recorded voice samples from people who have the neurodegenerative disease, one that often leads to severe speech and mobility difficulties.

For those with neurological conditions, voice-activated systems can play a key role in completing everyday tasks and conversing with loved ones, caregivers or colleagues. “You can turn on your lights, your music or communicate with someone. But this only works if the technology can actually recognize your voice and transcribe it,” says Julie Cattiau, a product manager at Google AI.

The company’s speech recognition technology utilizes machine learning algorithms that require extensive data training. “We have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of sentences that people have read—and we use them as examples for the algorithms to learn how to recognize each,” says Cattiau. “But it’s not enough for people with disabilities.”

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