Say "thank you" to Alexa when she tells you what the was the name of the dog the Soviets sent up in low space orbit in 1957? (Answer: Laika). Otherwise, she'll get you in the robot uprising. So, be nice to her.
More than 55% of US adults own smart speakers, or home products. 45 million use them every day, and 70 million at least monthly. How can marketers use this boom? But first, let's find out:
What is the Interactive Voice Experience?
An interactive voice experience is, basically, any interaction that uses voice-first technology, across a variety of voice 'channels', or voice-enabled smart devices. This might include mobile chatbots, smart speakers, voice apps, and IOT-enabled devices. Anything that will help with conversational-based brand engagement.
In their whitepaper 'Introducing the Interactive Voice Experience', Readspeaker.ai suggest that:
“Together, these voice channels (and others) make up a distinct digital ecosystem called the Internet of Voice.”
An interactive voice experience means leveraging these devices, in order to engage consumers using voice technology. This can extend to interactive voice ads, which is an audio ad which uses voice tech to prompt consumers to engage directly with an advert, using their own voice.
Alongside the interactive experience marketers can add on a call-to-action that triggers a desired response from listeners. Companies that leverage this tech can deliver a creative message that develops a direct response to interact with the brand, on the customer's own terms.
Plus, anything that is dynamic, captivating and interesting is going to stand out. And from all the interaction, comes a good deal of behavioural data.
This is all aided by highly promising leaps in voice recognition technology. Plus, Adobe Analytics actually suggests that ‘having a smart speaker dramatically increases confidence in the technology, and more frequent usage as a result.’
By 2019, Pandora, a streaming service, was testing voice-activated ads for brands including Unilever, Wendy's and Doritos.
For example:
Though some of these examples seem to rely on the 'yes' or 'no' answer of the customer, some voice agencies are developing voice ads that follow useful progressions no matter how the listener initially responds. Instreamatic found that, for one of its campaigns, more than 5% of listeners who declined to pursue a first conversation accepted a second ad’s offer.
One word - convenience.
“Speed has always proven to be the killer app. Save me time and I’ll use you.” says Alexandre Linares, CTO of Alpine.AI
Voice technology also provides users with:
This all shows that consumers no longer see voice tech as a novelty, but as mainstream.
In fact, 60% of all searches will be voice searches by 2021. Consumers have been getting more and more comfortable with the technology, possibly due to how prevalent smart speakers, and mobile voice assistants are.
Well, people could still feel reluctant to use such a new technology. For example, they might:
Increased interactivity, and hyper-personalisation are the two trends driving the future of voice advertising. Though the ads are appearing mostly on audio streaming services like Pandora, and Spotify, they're now appearing on smart TVs and smart speakers. NBCUniversal’s streaming service, Peacock, actually started running voice-activated ads way back in August of 2020.
"Meanwhile, voice-activated advertising will make the leap from business-to-consumer (B2C) outreach to business-to-business (B2B) marketing," says Nate Murray of Readspeaker.ai.
"As more and more web pages become voice-enabled, B2B marketers will need ways to transfer their on-page ads and calls to action into an audio format. If you listen to a blog from a company website, a voice-activated ad at the end can replace a high-value link or contact form."
Readspeaker.ai suggests taking three steps. Starting with the people, moving to plans, and finishing with the tech.
ReadSpeaker.ai elaborates: “Voice technology leans heavily on artificial intelligence, combining natural language understanding with neural TTS, synthetic voices developed by deep neural networks (DNN). But most of that operates behind the scenes.”
As with anything, it's also important to consider expectations and measure results. Traditional ROI metrics are difficult to measure with voice.
'Soft returns', like improved customer engagement, brand lift and affinity, might be a more accurate fit.
ReadSpeaker AI states that “More engaged customers are 23% more profitable than a casual buyer.”