Message from CEO

I have always observed the evolution of voice technology from IBM’s Shoebox device in 1961 to the recent voice assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana. The rapid change in voice technology has changed the way people interact with smart devices. Voice assistants have become an integral part of any conversation between humans and machines. It is being used in almost every day-to-day chores such as searching, emailing, shopping etc. Also, the advent of IoT and integration of voice assistants with IoT devices has enabled us to communicate with home appliances offering the freedom to control everything from one place. Looking at the path that voice technology has traversed in a consumer/ user world, I couldn’t stop myself from envisaging how this voice technology would change the dimensions of current business environment.

Imagine setting up a business meeting with the C-suite of a company, and the sub-tasks involved at the backend. For e.g.: fixing a date that is feasible for all stakeholders involved in the meeting, preparing presentations, and sending reminders etc. The manual effort involved in the process is very time consuming. However, with recent advancements in technology, a virtual assistant could set up a meeting with just few commands from you, send frequent reminders for acceptance, book a presentation hall, and set up everything that is required. It could also help with creating visualizations by combining different sources of data, performing in-depth analysis and connecting the dots between various divisions of the company (which can easily escape from the human sight), providing forecasted data as well as recommendations and action plans. This seems to be just the tip of the iceberg and there is lot more that a voice enabled assistant could do for businesses, from increasing communication and transparency in the organisation to transforming the customer service, training, data access, sourcing and procurement operations, and nearly all aspects of a business.

Also, along with voice enabled virtual assistant, voice search is taking precedence among businesses. It is projected that 50% of all searches by 2020 will be through voice. Businesses are working towards optimising their content as the users are using different queries/ keywords and languages. Searches are becoming more human and queries are getting elaborated, more like a conversation between two people. Businesses should now consider optimising their search engine strategies to accommodate this change. Companies should monitor the type of search queries put forth by users, modify their algorithms and train the machines in order to capture the natural language queries and be able to provide appropriate actionable insights.  

Whichever way we look, voice search and conversational AI appears to be the future and it is growing exponentially among the consumers and businesses. It is offering great opportunity for business to race ahead of the herd and be the first one to scale the peak. Are you ready to embrace the change?

Satyakam Mohanty
Chief Light Bulb, Lymbyc