The Challenges of Monetizing Speech Applications
Large companies tend to be most successful at monetizing speech apps, agrees Mitch Lieberman, cofounder of ConversationalX, who advises following the strategies of such companies. Develop speech applications that have wide appeal. The end user needs to have a compelling reason to use speech rather than another type of interface. For example, Comcast’s application for controlling the TV via voice offers compelling convenience. It’s much easier to say “find program xyz” than to scroll through an onscreen menu with perhaps hundreds of channels.
“It’s like the gold rush,” Lieberman says. “The people who made money during the gold rush weren’t the people who were looking for the gold; it was the people making Levi’s jeans.” That is, while very few people mining for gold ever found any, nearly everyone looking was wearing the jeans.
Similarly, Lieberman says, “The people who are making money [with speech applications] aren’t just providing voice; they’re providing better speech recognition or a better microphone to eliminate background noise.”
Others are just at the beginning phases of not only providing basic speech applications but also detecting sentiment via the speaker’s tone of voice, word choices, etc. “You could put these words through a text engine but would not get the same type of results back,” Freeze says. Another reason some have failed to monetize speech applications is that an offering was pushed out quickly without enough investment and development behind it—just like cheap jeans that fall apart after you wear them a few times, says Lieberman.
Speech applications need to continue to evolve, Meadows says. “Each year the work becomes more difficult because customers continue to demand more.”
But investing in the technology alone isn’t enough, Freeze cautions. “We’ve seen failures and some heavy losses from some companies. Part of the reason is that they don’t understand the art of the possible.”
In other words, these companies develop speech applications without seeing—and explaining to potential customers—all of the possible uses of the technology. For example, they might see some of the IVR possibilities, but don’t incorporate natural language speech, which limits the user to only a few strictly defined phrases. As a result, the overall usage and monetization capability is limited.
Test, Test, Test
To be successful, speech application developers need to start small, test early and often, then expand from there, Freeze advises. “It’s important to understand that you need to walk before you can run.”
Testing is the missing element for many companies that don’t successfully monetize their speech applications, agrees Peggy Chen, chief marketing officer for SDL, a language translation provider. “You need to test the application at scale and across many types of content types.” If translations don’t work in areas with many different dialects (the Philippines has hundreds, for example), it won’t scale or monetize as expected.
Meadows adds that testing doesn’t end when the product is rolled out. Speech application providers need to continue to test and improve their offerings because customers will want better products with continually enhanced capabilities. The same speech application that might have been successful five years ago may fail today if it stops making progress.
AI Key to Future Monetization
More monetization of speech applications will come as artificial intelligence evolves and becomes more integrated with the apps, says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting.
AI will also make its presence felt in voice-related advertising, Tushinskiy says. Rather than recording several different audio advertising messages, enterprises and advertising firms will need to generate just one, and AI will handle all of the variations.
“We are just at the beginning of converting existing IVR technologies to speech applications,” Fluss says. “Companies need to rethink their technology. Down the road, IVR and RPA will be coming together with AI and machine learning. The use of AI is just in its infancy.”
Phillip Britt is a freelance writer based in the Chicago area. He can be reached at spenterprises@wowway.com.
Related Articles
McDonald's recent acquisition of Apprente was big news, but voice-ordering is nothing new to the world of fast-food. This move just goes to show how important speech technology will be in the future of QSRs.
02 Oct 2019
The race is on to include chatbots in marketing and CRM efforts, but many companies still aren't getting it right—and these tips can help
23 Sep 2019
Speech Technology interviewed Walter Rolandi, Ph.D. of The Voice User Interface Company, to talk about new dialog development tools versus traditional speech IVR technologies and how they measure up.
24 Jul 2019
Explore four consumer trends that are driving the growth of voice intelligence in point of sale platforms.
01 May 2019
"We don't have solutions yet, but we have the roadmap on how we're going to get to the solutions," says Navya Nayaki Yelloji, product manager of voice platforms at Gannett.
29 Apr 2019
Walmart is getting into the voice shopping game! Last week the company announced Walmart Voice Order with Google Assistant, a direct challenge to Amazon's dominance in the voice shopping world.
08 Apr 2019
The smart speaker marketplace—think Amazon Echo and Google Home—is growing like gangbusters, and digital marketers who are in the know, are bracing for its impact. The emerging category is evolving rapidly, and could affect the digital marketing landscape in a similar way that mobile devices and smartphones did a decade ago—except maybe faster and more pervasively.
23 Jan 2019