The Conversational user interface (UI) is now the talk of the town. Smartphone users of all ages and geographies have become such avid texters that messaging and messaging platforms seem to be getting all the attention. We wrote recently about the burgeoning messaging trend in our post “Messaging: The Future of Brand Engagement.”

As undeniable as the dominance of messaging is, it’s important not to lose sight of the other player spurring on the growth of the Conversational UI. People could talk before they could write and voice is still the most natural and comfortable way for people to get things done in many situations, especially when eyes and hands need to be focused on something other than a smartphone screen.

The team at MindMeld, a company pioneering the development of technology to power a new generation of voice-driven applications, recently shared results from a user adoption survey and offered some interesting insights into how voice-assisted Conversational UI continues to gain traction.

MindMeld’s study focused specifically on how smartphone users are adopting “intelligent voice assistants,” including Siri, Google Now, and Cortana. Some 1800 smartphone users responded to an online questionnaire this past January. All were over the age of 18 and respondents included equal numbers of males and females geographically dispersed across the United States.

One finding that stands out is a recent acceleration in user adoption of voice assistants. MindMeld draws the conclusion that 2015 represented a tipping point for the usage of voice search and voice commands by smartphone users interacting with intelligent assistants. 45% of users indicated that they’d just started using intelligent voice assistants within the past year. But a whopping 28% said they’d only begun talking to intelligent voice assistants within the past 6 months.

This data suggests a wave of late adopters are beginning to leverage voice interfaces. If this trend mimics other technology adoption patterns it could signal an approaching wave of general acceptance of voice-driven interfaces by smartphones users.

Another key finding in the MindMeld survey was the revelation that people who take advantage of voice interfaces demonstrate a higher app usage rate than people who don’t use voice. For businesses and brands struggling to increase app usage, offering integration with voice commands may be a strategy worth exploring.

Here’s a quick glance at additional survey results:

• 62% of smartphone owners use intelligent voice assistants. Siri comes in first, Google Now second, and Cortana places a distant third.
• Age doesn’t seem to be as large of a differentiator as one might think in terms of who does and who doesn’t use voice assistants. It’s true that 18-24 year olds show the highest usage rate, with 52% saying they leverage the technology, but other age groups follow along pretty closely. When you get to the age group of those 65 and older, usage of intelligent voice assistants does drop significantly, but it still comes in at 26%.

The survey data shows more and more people are using their voice to get things done on their smartphones. Interesting, 4% of survey respondents said they use voice commands with Amazon Alexa. Intelligent voice assistants aren’t limited to smartphones any longer, but are quickly taking up residence all around us. Underscoring this trend, just today, Amazon announced portable versions of Alexa: the Amazon Tap and Echo Dot.

Voice interfaces are definitely mainstream. Still, users would like to see improvements. In the MindMeld survey, 44% of respondents say they’d like it if intelligent voice assistants could better understand what they are saying and 28% say they wish they could speak more naturally. With the rapid advancements in speech recognition and natural language understanding technologies, users probably won’t have to wait long to get their wish.

As businesses create their roadmaps for technology adoption, companies that serve customers should be planning for, if not already implementing, both messaging-based and voice-based Conversational UIs.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles