Page 9 - AeM_July_2018

RESEARCH, ANALYSIS & TRENDS

current need, are in a hurry and quickly need a Accenture revealed that internet users in India and
relevant search result, searches by voice from the China showed relatively high interest in owning voice-
smartphone come into play enabled technology, since the technology simplifies the
use of character-based languages: 51% of regular
Primarily (local) restaurants, the entertainment industry
and supermarkets will benefit from this trend, as well as voice control users in China and 57% in Japan said
review and news websites of all categories, that gain they used voice to save them from typing.
traffic through voice search queries for short and concise While Google and Amazon gained an early foothold in
answers to current questions. the US and are expanding into Europe and Latin
America, China-based companies like Alibaba, Baidu,
Some large corporations are already investing more in
artificial intelligence (AI) and integrate digital language Tencent, JD.com and Xiaomi are making the most
assistants in their marketing activities. For instance, headway in Asia, eMarketer.com reported. “Samsung,
Walmart and Google partnered to allow Walmart KT, Kakao Corp. and SK Telecom have established
customers in the US ordering products via voice from early leadership positions in South Korea and other
Google Home and get them delivered in a timely parts of Asia Pacific. This landscape could undergo
manner. dramatic changes if and when some of the players in
the region gain a foothold in the US and/or Europe, or
Publishers are currently also taking their chance to vice versa”, eMarketer said.
experiment with digital voice assistants, raising the Summing up, the emerging popularity of digital
question whether tech manufacturers will develop language assistants brings obviously many
features that publishers can deploy reasonably. Amazon opportunities, though there is no guarantee that the
released, for instance, Polly Plugin for WordPress, which voice search will prevail as suspected. Nevertheless, it
allows you to convert (written) blog posts into audio files is worthwhile to be the first to try new ideas on the
(including podcasts), seemingly holding a lot of potential. market.

Considering that Juniper Research forecasts that by Above all, it remains exciting to see which innovations
2022 more than 5 billion voice assistants will be in use are currently and in future developed by the
on smartphones worldwide (taking into account that manufacturers. Especially, since the competition
multiple assistants may be installed on a single device), among the tech giants is known to promote innovation
we certainly shouldn’t underestimate the impact of digital – which, in turn, provide companies with further
voice assistants. Just look at Apple’s introduction of Siri (technical) possibilities in experimenting with language
that signaled the first voice assistant push into the assistants. Although it still remains to be seen whether
mobile ecosystem, that has grown to include digital language assistants will prevail in the long term,
smartphones, tablets, headphones, wearables, laptops it is already clear that Google will in all likelihood no
and other portable personal gadgets. longer be the only strong player in the SEO market. ◊

Furthermore, the Asia Pacific region is expected to be
one of the largest markets for voice control use: China By Daniela La Marca
and South Korea are hotbeds of voice control technology
development and adoption of the technology is
particularly high in Thailand and Japan.

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