7 Ways Voice is Rapidly Evolving

The first weeks of this year brought two major gatherings on voice. The first was with the backdrop of the glitz of Vegas at CES. The second was far from the lights across the country in Chattanooga. Both Voice Summit and Project Voice featured Google, Amazon, Samsung and others shedding light on where things are and where things are likely to go with voice. This was my second time at the Chattanooga conference and the tone this year was decidedly a less dreamy “what if” and a more realistic “how come.” The lessons about users, logic, simplicity and devices resonated through the halls.

Here are 7 top-line takeaways:

1. The pace of skill development has slowed — There are more than 100,000 skills on the Alexa platform worldwide, but according to Voicebot.Ai only 14,000 were added in 2019. This suggests that momentum is slowing. But why? Have major companies all built their successful skills? Are they now spending time iterating? Have they failed and packed up their science project bags and moved on to the next shiny thing? All of the above. It is clearly a business growing up fast and moving beyond the era of the hobbyist. Along with growth comes frustration for many and success for some. Every new platform goes through a steep learning curve. Voice is no different.