Voice Technology Is Connecting Brands And Customers

10 years back big LED mobile phones were in the rage, then came Cameras, SMS. Since then the whole lot is text over talk but in recent times we are following hieroglyphics as emojis used as speech through texting instead of words. We may not be using text as much as we used to. Now the current trend is having virtual assistants such as Alexa, Siri, Ok Google and apps such as Dragon Anywhere, Swype speech-to-text and speech-activated functions are growing.

What does Voice recognition mean?

It is computer analysis of human voice, it distinguishes and validates the voice of an individual speaker. It is also called speech recognition.

When did speech recognition start?

Speech recognition started in the early 1970’s Hidden Markov Modelling (HMM) approach to speech and voice recognition was invented Lenny Burn from Princeton University and shared with several ARPA contractors including IBM.

How does this work?

An ADC (Analog Digital Converter) translates your voice into digital data that the computer can understand. The public doesn't always speak at the same speed, so the sound must be adjusted to match the speed of the pattern sound samples which is previously stored in the system's memory. Upcoming trends on voice-recognition: In September, Swift Keyboard a new version where it can spot similar sentences and capture the relationship and similarity between words. It is only available in US and UK English for now and more languages are promised. Baidu’s TalkType which is operated entirely fully functional Android Keyboard and help user text three times faster typing.

Current Usage of speech recognition around the world

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai says that 20% of Google searches on smartphones are now done by voice and 40% people use voice search once a day. 60% of people started using voice search in the last 6 months. Amazon sold 4. 4 million Echo units in the first nine months of 2016. Today’s speech recognition word error rate is 8 per cent.

From Amazon Echo to Google Home: How do these brands help to connect other brands

TimeOut is a city guide that publishes a magazine and other guidebooks that cover events and attraction all around the world. With the help of Amazon’s Alexa TimeOut has helped the users to merely ask the questions. They have even updated the top 3 things to do that day in that city.

Nova Effect is an app which helps the parents to tell story in deeper and special way by listening to story the app plays the theme music and gives sound effect relevant to story. Johnny Walker, the whiskey brand has uniquely introduced Alexa by asking several questions about their preferences then the tool will recommend the right whiskey for their taste.

Tide the detergent brand is using Alexa skill to help people remove stains from laundry. The voice interface will help the users to clean different types of stains by giving the instructions step by step when the user’s hands are full (and untidy). Tides skill delivers the instructions in a very user-friendly format and this helps to promote the brand.