Voice assistant devices are increasingly becoming a common household gadget in US. It has something for every age group. Me, personally, having used google home for quite a sometime now, have always thought that these assistants can do something more. This is a combined thought on how it can impact an end user and how it can also benefit the enterprise solutions.
Audio streaming – Often, we listen to audio more than watching video in our day today life. It can be something entertaining for fun or technical for work.
1) Standup comedy shows in Netflix might be good to hear direct from google home rather than watching it in TV.
2) Listening to radios are other examples. Since the radio itself is mostly obsolete, we listen to radio through our TV.
3) Subscribe to podcast and listen to the audio when there is a new content available. Even more cooler, It will be good to be notified when there are new content available in the channel.
Pay-As-You-Hear/Go can also be a business model suitable for this adoption.
Telephone – Google home can call any of the mobile subscribers in US and Canada. If it can also receive call, then the Plain Old Telephone Services (POTS) can be replaced. You would assume that this might be simple by associating your google voice service with google home. Once after this association google should be able to provide a way to call another google home like how alexa does. And with the cloud service, functionalities like leaving a voice message and retrieving it, etc should be seamless.
Relevant targeted Ads – Many of us make use of the recommendation while we do online shopping. Analytics is derived by viewing history either in mobile apps or by looking at website’s user history in browser. As we start using voice assistants more, the voice history can also be added to refine the recommendations. These recommendations can be suggested through mobile apps or websites in browsers. This adds one more level of personalization and also helps in selling relevant ads.
Leads generation – Connecting the customer with the right business source. Finding the right app that might help you with information that you are looking for.
1) When you need a plumbing work to be done, home advisor helps you get connected with the plumber near you.
2) Food delivery using Uber eats connects restaurants who cannot afford to have their own fleet of delivery service to serve their customers.
3) Online shopping and delivery using google express makes you find the right product with competitive price advantage. Also it maintains the cart on its own for various stores.
Voice notification – Voice notifications through google home is really a neat choice to notify the user. However, it might be difficult to play the message understanding the right context. For example understanding the sensitivity of message, playing it to the right user, etc might be a huge challenge.
1) Replacement to mobile reminders – While at home, reminders set in mobile should automatically be reminded through voice assistant devices.
2) Replacement to door bells – A nest door cam connected with google account can tell you who is waiting on the door in your google home.
At-last, 3 things that I consider for any voice enabled assistant devices –
1) Hardware upgrade – The hardware upgrade needed for these devices should be very minimal or near zero.
2) Name it – Giving your own name to your assistant will make it look like a more personalized experience.
3) Go offline – Capability to store offline and play it even when the network is not available. Currently only online mode is supported.
I am sure that many companies are building seamless experience with voice assistant devices. It is just matter of time that this ecosystem gets more apps that could cater variety of use cases.
Shankar's Blog 