Gartner said that by 2019, it expects 20% of all user interactions with smartphones will take place via VPAs such as Siri, Cortana or Google Now. A survey of 3,021 consumers found that 42% of respondents in the US and 32% in the UK had used VPAs on their smartphones in the last three months. More than 37% of respondents (average across U.S. and U.K.) used a VPA at least one or more times a day.
Apple’s Siri and Google Now are currently the most widely used VPAs on smartphones. 54% of U.K. and U.S. respondents used Siri in the last three months. Google Now is used by 41% of U.K. respondents and 48% of U.S. respondents.
This trend is also intensified by the acceleration of conversational commerce, but voice is not the only UI for VPA use. In fact, Facebook Messenger is allowing users to interact with businesses to make purchases, chat with customer services and order Uber cars within the app. Moreover, Tencent’s WeChat generates over $1.1 billion in revenue by offering its 440 million users an all-in-one approach, letting them pay their bills, hail cabs and order products with a text.
China represents the most mature market by far, where the increased dominance of messaging platforms is causing the traditional app market to stall. This trend is continuing to grow, not only among consumers but also among businesses or in the prosumer context. For example, Microsoft’s integration of Cortana into Skype will allow users to chat with their VPA. Cortana will then facilitate the interaction with a third-party bot to get things done, such as a hotel or flight booking.
“We expect AI, machine learning and VPAs to be one of the major strategic battlegrounds from 2017 onwards, and make many mobile apps fade and become subservants of VPAs,” said Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner.
Voice and Gesture Become Increasingly Important Interfaces
With a predicted installed base of about 7 billion personal devices, 1.3 billion wearables and 5.7 billion other consumer Internet of Things (IoT) endpoints by 2020, the majority of devices will be designed to function with minimal or zero touch.
By 2020, Gartner predicts that zero-touch UIs will be available on 2 billion devices and IoT endpoints. “Interactions will move away from touchscreens and will increasingly make use of voice, ambient technology, biometrics, movement and gestures,” said Ms. Zimmermann. “In this situation, apps using contextual information will become a crucial factor in user acceptance, as a voice-driven system’s usability increases dramatically according to how much it knows about the user’s surrounding environment. This is where device vendors’ assets or partnerships in VPAs, natural language processing (NLP) and deep machine learning experts will matter.”
Analyst Comment
I have experimented with writing articles using voice, as Google Now has become extremely good, if care is taken with diction. However, I keep going back to the keyboard. I must try again! I regularly use Google Now when completing a crossword I like to try to complete each week (and never do!). Some of the queries that I give the search engine are very obscure, so the accuracy really impresses me. (BR)
