Is voice the missing link in your applications? Hear our CEO describe the four scenarios where voice search could take your projects to the next level.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Hi, I’m Tim Tuttle, and I’m the CEO of Expect Labs. One of the questions that we get a lot of the time from the developers is they want to know when it’s appropriate to include voice as a feature in their apps, when should they consider putting voice into their apps. We’ve built many different applications like this at Expect Labs and so we have a pretty strong opinion about it, and so I’ll let you know where our thinking is here.
So the times when you should consider putting voice in your apps are, there are four situations. The first is if you have a lot of users that are using your app or your service on devices that don’t have keyboards. Clearly if you want to have a lot of mobile or smartphone users, if you have any users that are accessing your content from a set-top box or a smart TV application, or maybe even have users that are using wearables, those are all cases where voice is critical.
The second time you should consider using voice is if your users are often using your application when their hands are busy. This could obviously mean driving or walking or biking. If you have apps that are used in that context voice is critical. It could also be if your users tend to use their app while they are doing other things like cooking in the kitchen or maybe writing a document, playing a musical instrument. Any time your services are actually used when users, their hands are busy, it’s a great time for voice.
The third situation where voice is really helpful is any time a user is trying to navigate a large content collection. The reason why voice is useful in these situations because a lot of times voice can be a much faster way to find a piece of content than to use a keyboard or touchscreen to find it. So if you think about it, if you said, “I’m looking for a restaurant near Union Square that has really good sushi and is open after 10PM.” You can find a piece of content using a voice command, probably in about five seconds, whereas if you had to navigate through a set of menus on a touchscreen or keyboard, it generally would involve a multistep search or a multistep browse, and it will probably take you 15 to 20 seconds. So by using voice instead, you can save your users some cases 10 seconds, 20 seconds, maybe even more.
Now the last case that you should seriously consider using voice is if you have users that are trying to accomplish tasks that generally require multiple steps. Let’s say you have a user that wants to book a hotel reservation and so, they would go to a hotel website and they would say, “I’m looking for a hotel in New York City, somewhere near Central Park, that is not too expensive, that is a Marriott, and that’s available from Saturday to Monday.” We’ve all done that search we know that that could probably take a minute, maybe even two minutes. Using voice, you can potentially get that search done in a matter of seconds. You just support a simple voice query like the one I just said; “Show me all the Marriott hotels near Central Park, that are inexpensive and available from Saturday to Monday.” You can find the list and then book the hotel in a matter of seconds and then save your user’s time.
If your application falls in any of those categories, I think it’s a great idea to start looking at how you can use voice to make things easy for your users.
