Why should you add voice to your apps?

It's 2022. The world wants to talk more than type. Is your app there yet?

In this session, we will review case studies showcasing the need to allow users to interact with your apps using voice. We are also going to analyze industry data to understand the importance of voice inside apps. We will examine the difficulties faced by users with varying digital literacy levels, and how voice can be a tool to solve these problems. We would look at how enabling voice can make your apps faster, easier to use and more accessible.

Transcript

1. Why should you add voice to your apps? It's 2022. The world wants to talk rather than type. Is your app there yet?
2. What do you think of when I say Voice? Smart devices and smartphone assistants. But these exist outside the universe of your app.
3. Today we will talk about adding voice to apps
4. Today we will talk about adding voice to apps
5. “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” - W. Edwards Deming
6. How many people use smart speakers? Nearly 35% of people in USA have a smart speaker device.
7. How many people use smartphones? For the US, 85% of the population owned a smartphone as on February 2021.
9. Smartphone devices heavily outnumber smart speakers.
10. 15% of US adults are mobile-only internet users. In 2019, WARC estimated 2 billion people accessed the internet via only their smartphone. This equated to 51% of the global base of 3.9 billion mobile users at the time.
11. With this context, adding voice to apps becomes important.
12. Most smart devices lack a screen. Apps are the primary channel users are aware of.
13. Why should brands embrace voice?
15. User research
18. Why did these people struggle to use these apps? • App navigation is painful • Discovery is broken with limited real estate • Typing is a hurdle and tedious in non-English languages • Literacy, especially with English is a challenge • Learning curve with apps can be steep
19. The people in the audience might not have faced these issues.
20. For NBUs mobile phones are the source and introduction of their digital journey…
21. … Their experience has to be simple enough to enable them to start, and powerful enough to allow them to scale as they evolve.
22. Case studies
23. E-Commerce
24. Amazon India • Activate by clicking on the mic icon or the Alexa button • Supports English language • Voice search and voice navigation is supported • You can speak phrases like “Search for mobile phones” or “Track my order” • Alexa on Amazon.in app received over 1 million requests during Prime Early Access for Great Indian Festival 2020
25. Flipkart • Activate by clicking on the mic icon in the search bar • Supports English and Hindi • Functionality limited to searching for items • The Assistant can understand local dialects, colloquial terms and mixed language commands • Flipkart took 2 years to build and integrate a voice assistant to their app
26. JioMart • Activate by clicking on the mic icon near the search bar • Voice Assistant built for retail shopping • Supports English and Hindi • Voice search, add to cart and navigation journeys supported • It is capable of completing simple user journeys entirely • Try phrases like “Show me biscuits” or “Add the first one to cart”
27. Nykaa • Activate by clicking on the mic icon in the search bar • Assistant built for retail domain • Supports English language • Voice search is supported • Try phrases like “Show me red mac lipstick” or “Search for foundation” • Assistant is context aware, so understands the difference between “eye shadow” and “I shadow” for a user utterance
28. Travel
29. Redbus • Activate by clicking on the mic icon at the bottom • Assistant built for travel domain • Supports English and Hindi languages • Voice search is supported • Assistant supports a back-and-forth interaction for disambiguation Collapses on Scroll
30. Banking and Finance
31. Bank of America • Erica is a virtual financial assistant • English language supported • Supports transactions, viewing balance and rewards, card management, account information • By Q1 2021, Erica had 19.5M users and 105M interactions
32. Paytm - Soundbox • UPI has enabled the masses to perform digital transactions • But there are literacy challenges • Lower literacy users relied on UI elements to check transactions • In order to overcome this challenge Paytm came up with the Soundbox • Speaks out confirmation after transaction is successful
33. ICICI Direct • Assistant for banking domain • English language supported • Navigation user journeys supported - viewing transactions, tax statements, capital gains, top stocks, recommendations • Support for voice search for stocks to be added soon • Try phrases like “Show my capital gains statement” or “Show my equity transactions”
34. Voice 🤝 Apps
35. Voice prompt design can help apps direct users.
36. Voice allows multi-lingual support with low app-side effort.
37. Voice can completely flatten your app’s UI.
38. Takeaways • Leading brands across domains have already started adding voice to their apps • Voice can serve different purposes for a variety of audiences • Brands need to voice-enable their offerings, not just for convenience but also to enable lower literacy users • Voice can make things faster, easier and more accessible • Smartphone penetration is much higher than smart devices, so brands have to strategize accordingly
39. Anshaj Khare Android Developer Slang Labs @KhareAnshaj Slang Labs provides accurate and multilingual voice assistants. These in-app intelligent virtual assistants can be used out of the box for apps with just a few lines of code. @SlangLabs