81 Percent of Consumers Use Voice Tech at Least Weekly

Voice technology has gained mass adoption with U.S. consumers, both at home and in the workplace, according to new research from TELUS Digital Solutions.

Voice tech has reached a tipping point, the firm concluded, noted that 81 percent of Americans said they use it daily or weekly and 68 percent said they've incresed their use in the past year. Additionally, while 36 percent of consumers said they started using voice tech two to five years ago, 25 percent tried it for the first time in just the past month.

TELUS Digital credits advancements in generative AI with moving voice technology forward, improving interactions with virtual agents and driving next-gen experiences that provide a competitive edge for the companies that offer it. Notably, 58 percent of respondents would be incentivized to try a brand if the company incorporated voice tech into its customer engagement channels. This is reinforced by the fact that nearly 69 percent of consumers had a positive first experience with voice tech and continue to use it, while just 6 percent had a negative first experience and haven't used it since.

"Over the next year, every consumer app and website will have to be rebuilt with an AI-powered voice and multimodal interface to take full advantage of the advancements in voice tech, such as Apple Intelligence and Google AI," said Tobias Dengel, president of TELUS Digital Solutions, in a statement. "We see multimodal experiences that combine voice, visual, and touch inputs as the future of how people will interact with technology, and our survey findings show that consumers increasingly want more natural and intuitive ways to engage with digital platforms."

In the research, the top reasons consumers said they used voice tech included the following:

• Speed and efficiency: 35 percent said speaking is faster than typing.
• Convenience: 31 percent feel that voice commands are simpler than navigating menus; and
• Multitasking: 30 percent like that voice tech allows them to perform other tasks simultaneously.

As for how respondents use voice tech, 56 percent use it exclusively for personal tasks, 33 percent use it in both work and personal settings, and 11 percent use it exclusively at work, the research found. The top applications of voice tech in their personal lives include daily tasks (66 percent), communications (66 percent), and information retrieval (55 percent). Uses in their work lives include voice-to-text for email, message, and content creation (44 percent), information retrieval (37 percent), and administrative tasks (32 percent).

As Americans embrace voice tech mainly for its speed and efficiency, it's not surprising that their patience wears thin when things go wrong, TELUS Digital concluded in the report. Many consumers have encountered errors: 65 percent said their voice assistants have misunderstood their commands, one-third (33 percent) have had them execute commands incorrectly, and 27 percent have received incorrect information. And when errors happen, 41 admit to yelling at their voice assistants and 30 percent have even used profanity. Nearly one-third (30 percent have raised their voices or used profanity with self-service tools, such as chatbots, in an attempt to escalate their issues more quickly.

On the flip side, the majority of Americans (62 percent) try to be polite, regularly saying "please", "thank you" and "you're welcome" during voice tech interactions, and 29 percent have even apologized for being rude.

Consumers also identified areas for improvement that could increase their use of voice tech, including the following:

• 53 percent said they'd like to see improved accuracy in responses.
• 46 percent said voice tech should be better at handling accents and dialects.
• 41 percent said they want faster response times.
• 41 percent said they would like to see improved security features and privacy controls.