Voice-based apps and their practical future

I start every morning next to my smart clock, watch, and phone which can all recognize my voice and have access to an ever-growing database of information they can supply me with. As I walk out to the living room, I can ask my smart speaker about the weather forecast and my agenda for the day. When I get in my car, the same information is carried through and I can change my music with my voice, book appointments, and record memos.

All these applications of speech recognition are now a regular part of our daily routines, and they’re rapidly entering the business world. With many companies looking to further enable their digital sales organizations and buyers’ data becoming infinitely valuable, multiple software platform providers have released voice-based offerings to record sales meetings, transcribe them, detect keywords, and create connected experiences.

Microsoft recently announced that it is rolling out enhancements to Teams that will connect the audio from meeting recordings to the entire Dynamics 365 suite of solutions and help identify insights from customer conversations. This is a great application of speech recognition and transcription, natural language processing, and pattern recognition to create a more seamless customer experience and to further empower teams. While most of us may think of Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa in the context of our daily lives, their business use cases are plentiful.

The familiar virtual assistant use case has a key application that is not yet widely spread which combines it with chatbots to deliver both internal resources to employees and external ones to customers. For example, healthcare organizations can use an NLP-enabled voice app to triage and screen patients, and then transcribe their data to be added to their charts. While healthcare has been a laggard industry, the past two years have vastly accelerated its transformation and it is now adopting new technology more than ever before. Similarly, the new employee onboarding experience can be improved with a smart companion that can guide them to resources, track their progress, and integrate with other applications to perform standard business functions.

There are some interesting developments in the world of integrated voice-apps that have emerged through companies like Voiceflow who enable users to design and implement their own integrations with external customer validation apps, chatbots, and more. With ready-to-use platforms like this, it’s easy to see voice and chat applications surge in adoption in the upcoming year and become more ingrained in the standard customer experience.