You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
The jury is out on the road ahead for Intelligent Assistants like Alexa and Siri, with the potential for customers to abandon the voice search technologies before they become sophisticated enough to work effectively, a market research company has warned.
Speaking at an event for publishers organised by US technology company Highwire in London last Friday (15th June), Collin Colburn, analyst at market researcher Forrester, said that while this is the age of “hyperadoption” of technology devices, with people seizing on new devices at a faster rate than ever before, it is equally an age of “hyperabandonment”, with customers moving on just as swiftly.
A recent piece of research saw Forrester ask a total of 720 purchasing questions, on topics covering six industries, to four AI devices: Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana. But Colburn said only 35% of those questions were usefully answered, with Google Assistant proving the most effective, answering 60% of its allocated questions accurately.
Colburn said the IAs’ shortfalls include struggling to give a direct answer because they do not understand user context; being unable to sustain a conversation, so you can’t ask them to clarify a point, but have to start your query again; and providing a poor customer experience, because they can’t parse content to give a simple response but just reproduce content which they find somewhere online. Consequently most people just use IAs for very simple purposes such as to check the weather, listen to audio, tell the time or set a monitor.
“What does the future look like? IAs will evolve,” Colburn predicted. “In the next three years, they will try to get better at responding to complex questions. In three to five years, they will begin to anticipate customers’ needs and wants before they ask the question, recommending solutions proactively. In five years plus, they will complete simple purchases on your behalf without the user’s input. There will also be more B2B environments for these IAs in time – people will be asking them questions related to work.”
But, he queried, “will users abandon these technologies before they get there?”
Forrester’s recommendations were not to worry about developing Alexa ‘skills’ or Google ‘actions’ just now, because they are expensive to produce and not heavily used. Instead, companies should focus on ensuring they think like a marketer to deliver content or information that people are seeking, and use SEO best practices to gain visibility, structuring content with keywords their audience uses in the titles, and putting content in front of the paywall to draw people in.