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The voice-first user interface has gone mainstream

A quantitative study of Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s Siri and Google’s OK Google shows where — and how — they're being used by consumers.
BY BEN BAJARIN JUN 7, 2016, 12:00P

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Going forward
I walked away from this study with confidence that the voice-user interface has gone mainstream. What’s more, mainstream consumers seem to recognize its value and convenience. Consider these statements from consumers:

It does not always work, but when it does it is very useful: 55 percent strongly agree
I would use my devices voice capabilities more if I could speak to it more naturally: 43 percent strongly agree
If it worked more often, I would use my device's voice assistants more: 48 percent strongly agree
I want my device’s voice interface to integrate better with more devices and apps that I use regularly: 66 percent strongly agree
I am not comfortable speaking to my technology: 41 percent strongly disagree
It is encouraging, from a sentiment perspective, that voice looks to be a natural extension of our keyboard/mouse/touch-based input and output methods. Consumers seem to recognize its value, and want it to work in more ways. I’ve long said that the true test of a great feature very early in its life cycle is when it combines both delight and frustration. Once you use it, you’re hooked, but you want it to be great all the time, because you can see the potential. This is why we snuck this question into the sentiment segment to see if consumers agreed: 47 percent strongly agree and 38 percent somewhat agree that when their voice assistant works, it's great, and when it doesn’t, they get irritated.

The battle for the voice-based assistant is on. This is another area where the one with the biggest ecosystem built around their voice UI/voice OS has the best shot of being "hired" by the masses.

The way people interact with computers is moving from text input to spoken questions and commands. That’s the assessment of Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker, who presented her annual Internet Trends report Wednesday at Vox Media-owned Re/code’s Code Conference.

The computer interface is shifting from the keyboard to the microphone as more people use speech-based digital assistants such as Apple’s (AAPL) Siri. Other companies in the field include Amazon.com‘s (AMZN) Alexa, Microsoft‘s (MSFT) Cortana, Alphabet‘s (GOOGL) Google Now and Nuance Communications‘ (NUAN) Nina.

The use of voice-based search and virtual assistants has soared as speech recognition has improved significantly in recent years, Meeker said. She says the percentage of smartphone owners in the U.S. who use voice assistants has risen from 30% in 2013 to 65% last year.

Google voice search queries are now more than seven times the level seen in 2010, Meeker said.

China search leader Baidu (BIDU) is seeing even faster adoption of voice search and speech-recognition apps because typing Chinese on a small cellphone keypad is more difficult than typing in English, Meeker said. Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng expects at least half of searches will be through images or speech by 2020.

A survey by MindMeld, a provider of intelligent conversational voice interfaces, found that people find voice apps most useful in situations when their hands or vision are occupied. Respondents also say it’s faster to speak a question or command than to type it.

The transition from keyboards to microphones for computer input, however, is still in its early innings, Meeker said.

The next step for voice-based digital assistants is for companies to open up their application program interfaces to third parties, she said. Amazon has already done that with Alexa and its Echo smart speakers. Google is taking similar action.

Apple is rumored to be developing a rival product to the Amazon Echo and plans to announce a software development kit to open up the device to third-party developers at its Worldwide Developers Conference June 13-17 in San Francisco.

In a research report Wednesday, RBC Capital Markets analyst Amit Daryanani said he expects Siri to be center stage at the company’s annual conference. He predicts Apple will showcase a Siri SDK for third-party developers to expand use cases for Siri and lay the groundwork for a Wi-Fi-enabled personal assistant device like Amazon Echo. 

According to a source familiar with VocalIQ’s product, it’s much more robust and capable than Siri’s biggest competitors like Google Now, Amazon’s Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana. In fact, it was so impressive that Apple bought VocalIQ before the company could finish and release its smartphone app. After the acquisition, Apple kept most of the VocalIQ team and let them work out of their Cambridge office and integrate the product into Siri.

Before Apple bought the company, VocalIQ tested its product against Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, and the results were impressive. Users asked each AI questions using normal language, not the robotic commands you’re used to using with digital assistants. Those commands can be long and complicated, and the other assistants had trouble catching everything.

How VocalIQ works
After writing the program, VocalIQ hired contractors through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to feed the program queries normal humans would ask and help it learn how people talk. These contractors would ask VocalIQ questions from a list of prompts to train the system. After about 3,000 dialogues, VocalIQ already started to get much more accurate. Once the process was finished, VocalIQ had recorded about 10,000 dialogues from Mechanical Turk contractors.

To put that in context, Siri brings in 1 billion queries per week from users to help it get better. But VocalIQ was able to learn with just a few thousand queries and still beat Siri.

VocalIQ may sound similar to Hound, a new digital assistant app that launched on iPhone and Android recently, but Hound only works one session at a time. VocalIQ remembers your context forever, just like a human can. That’s a massive breakthrough.

Because VocalIQ understands context so well, it essentially eliminates the need to look at a screen for confirmation that it’s doing what you want it to do. That’s useful on the phone, but could be even better for other ambitious projects like the car or smart speaker system . 

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

But it’s not hard to see how the startup’s tech could feed into Siri. On its homepage, VocalIQ says its main advantage over current voice assistants is its ability to ask users clarifying questions when it misunderstands commands – just like a real person would.

Furthermore, it can remember earlier responses and know how to reply to you based on context. Siri, Cortana and Google Voice can’t even remember the last question you asked.

VocalIQ says you shouldn’t have to learn to to know how to speak to voice assistants, they should be learning how to speak to you. That sounds like a good plan to me, so hopefully Apple makes fruitful use of the technology.