'India is one of the biggest markets for voice-based technology globally'

At the exchange4media-GroupM Voice Marketing Conference, an esteemed panel of technology leaders discussed how voice technology and voice-enabled solutions have evolved in light of ever-increasing number and usage of smartphones, expansion of existing applications, acceleration of voice adoption in AI-powered applications and increase in new voice applications. 

The panellists for the session were Anil Nair, CEO, VMLY&R; Dilip RS, Country Manager, Alexa Skills, Voice Service and Mobile, Amazon; Jayesh Ullattil, General Manager India, InMobi; Kumar Rangarajan, Co-founder and Obsessive Dictator, Slang Labs; Neha Barjatya, Marketing Head, Platforms & Devices, Google India; Shankar Jayaraman, SVP, Products, Jio Platforms, and the session was moderated by Tushar Vyas, President, GroupM South Asia.

Vyas commenced the session with an opening remark, “Voices are digitally powered by strong underlying technology like AI, ML or natural language processing. So in this panel, we are going to focus more on the intersection of product voice marketing. And this is something that we've covered in the report also, we are going in two directions, one ecosystem which is getting developed around the entire connected ecosystem and more to do with the smartphone, smart speaker and around those areas. Similarly, there is an interesting ecosystem which is getting developed around featured formats, building utility which is more into rural kind of environment and bringing life support to professional support to something which is a very utilitarian kind of activity that one can do around. So it's a very interesting spectrum of what is happening in a voice environment,” he said.

Jayaraman believes that voice is extremely important for customer engagement and states that voice will continue to play a key role in Jio’s upcoming launches. “At Jio, we strongly believe voice is very important for customer engagement. We have been integrating voice AI based technology across multiple products, be it our homegrown voice assistant or setup box service, where voice assistants play a crucial role in searching for content, interactivity, etc on the TV. Then there's our assistants on our feature phones, there’s a voice search within Jio Mart and also the first-of-its-kind interactive videobot service available on My Jio that enables our customers to interact with brands. Voice will continue to play a key role for interactivity for all our upcoming apps and device variants. And of course, as a telco, we believe voice communication or automation using voice for customer care is a critical component that we have invested in and will continue to invest in future,” he shared.

Speaking about the adoption of voice technology in the Indian market, Barjatya shared, “We definitely see the rapidly evolving phenomenon which is voice and technology and it will actually fundamentally change the way people interact with technology as we move forward. In fact, we believe that India will actually leapfrog when it comes to voice and skip typing and move to voices, interacting with technology, similar to what we saw with mobile usage when we became a mobile first internet user market. When we launched Google Assistant less than four years back in 2017 and since then, actually we've seen unprecedented growth in India for voice and for our system. 

Now India is one of the biggest markets for voice and Google Assistant globally. And Hindi is actually the second biggest language for the assistant after English, so that is the kind of adoption we're seeing for voice as a medium here and it's not actually just on digital assistant but we're seeing similar trends happen on Google search, we're seeing similar trends happen on YouTube. For instance, we are seeing almost like a 3X year on year growth for voice queries on search in India. So people are using ways to sort of interact with technology across our platforms, even on YouTube which is a trend actually very unique to India. So definitely India will sort of leapfrog for sure.” 

Elaborating on Amazon’s vision on making voice available for customers to be accessed from everywhere, Dilip RS states, “If we start with our vision, today, it's about how we make voice ubiquitous and available for customers to be accessed everywhere and only in one corner of your house, it will not take off as a technology, it needs to be accessible everywhere. So in lieu of that, we are trying to see how we can increase the footprint of any voice assistant, in our case Alexa. We started with just two brands in India like two smart speaker brands, which are non Amazon brands. Now we have 100 plus brands in India alone, which have voice integrated in the device. And these are across categories, today you could access voice on Alexa, on a smart speaker like boat speakers or Zebronics speaker, headphones now come with voice integrated. Just two weeks ago, we had two smartwatches launched by boat and Xiaomi which had Alexa integrated.”

Sharing brand perspective on voice marketing, Nair highlighted that voice can help brands to establish a deep relationship with their customers. He shared, “What is fascinating is I think we're on the cusp of something huge and till now, you have interacted through words or through typing and after that through video. And all of us felt that it was the biggest thing till voice came on the scene and and the sheer speed at which voice is kind of growing is mind boggling. And the interesting thing here is if you look at it from a brand’s perspective, they have always struggled to have a deep meaningful relationship with consumers and voice actually allows you that because there is an element of feeling in voice unlike videos or the written words. It also brings it as close to one on one human interaction as possible. So, your brand can literally take a human form while interacting with the consumer. 

The other interesting thing is technology exists for convenience, and we all eventually want to take it to the ultimate level of convenience. Therefore, an interesting thing about voice is the entire multitasking aspect, the entire hands free aspect of it. And last but not the least, it's about curation because this is a one on one kind of a medium. And what is interesting here is there is a degree of personalization where brands can actually talk to someone as differently as talking to someone else, and give them a highly personalized experience. If you ask me, one is a high degree of feeling and empathy and the second is a high degree of personalization and the third is convenience and all these three put together is like a winning thing for any brand. I would strongly exhort all brands to explore this medium as fast as possible if they want to win in the marketplace.”

Explaining about the features of voice technology, Ullattil stated that voice is personalized and gives a clutter free experience for audio advertising. “Voice is something which is very personalized. It is something which gives you that experience which probably the other senses don't give. One of the key things is that in audio versus video, the amount of signals that are being sent by one of our senses, which is the eye, is about 100 times more than the amount of audio senses. So, what it effectively means is that there's a lot of information which is passed. And if you look at it, what you're simply looking at right now, you probably have a thousand images you're seeing right now, but just one voice that you're hearing and that's mine. And that is exactly the power of audio in terms of advertising. While in case of a video or for that matter print, the amount of clutter that you have to cut through to put across a communication or messaging to your consumer is much higher, whereas in the case of audio at max you can hear two songs or rather you can comprehend two different conversations going on and not more than that. So it gives you a clutter free environment, so cutting the clutter becomes a very important piece that audio advertising does for you.”

Sharing his thoughts on voice technology, Rangarajan highlighted that the number of voice based searches has increased significantly. “We are a voice system as a service company that allows brands to easily integrate our multilingual voices system inside their mobile and web apps. So for our various customers, we have seen different kinds of engagement patterns that actually emerge. And so one is the most obvious on the number of searches that they do on apps have significantly increased with voice. The number of searches they do seems to have a direct impact on the number of conversions that are actually happening on the app. The kind of products that are being discovered, or data that is being provided is also high,” he said.