In the future, car manufacturers—and others—adopting a third-party branded voice assistant may find future limitations in their ability to meet growing demands of drivers, nurture brand affinity, or inform the product roadmap—costing them future sales and competitive advantages of a wholly-owned voice interface.
As a result, the largest organizations in the world are seeking voice AI platform providers to work side by side with internal teams to create branded voice assistants in considerably less time than building it themselves.
What is a custom voice assistant?
Before embarking on a voice-first initiative, take a step back and ask yourself and your stakeholders “why” you are voice-enabling your hardware, customer center, communications system, or mobile app. If the answer is to simply not get left behind, it’s tempting to choose a third-party assistant. If, on the other hand, your goal is to create unique user experiences, grow brand affinity and loyalty, and create an omni-channel voice experience, then you might want to carefully consider how you move forward with your initiative.
Key elements of an exceptional branded voice experience include:
Custom wake word
An artfully created custom wake word takes into consideration a variety of factors. In addition to making it easily pronounceable for your intended user, wake word design must reduce the incidence of false positives and negatives, avoid certain rhymes or other negative associations, factor in environmental conditions, and be designed with the future of the brand in mind.
As your product and business matures, you’ll want to make sure your custom voice assistant and wake word are key elements in your overall corporate roadmap and not an afterthought that detracts from your brand.
Proven TTS for unique voices
Having the flexibility to choose a voice to represent your brand is critical to your sonic branding image. However, you will want that voice to be tailored to your audience, beyond simply selecting the sound. The TTS technology behind the voice should be customizable to include multiple languages, specific pronunciations in your brand lexicon, and the ability to add emotions to your voice assistant.
Custom voices built with advanced TTS technology improve the naturalness, intelligibility, comprehensibility, and intonation of the voice assistant. A voice without customization is just another voice and not part of a truly custom voice experience.
Custom commands and broad content domains
Creating a unique user experience begins with designing a specialized voice assistant with deep knowledge of all domains most relevant to the individual brand. Companies that have already implemented successful custom voice assistants realized early on that people aren’t asking Pandora for the weather, nor are they asking Bank of America’s “Erica” to set an alarm. Users don’t need branded voice assistants to offer every functionality—and they don’t expect it. What they do expect is a voice assistant that can answer questions spoken without needing to know a specific script—naturally, the way we talk to each other.
In the future, we won’t be looking at one voice assistant to rule them all, instead the ubiquity of voice assistants will require specialization. Just as we don’t expect our family doctor to be our source of information on financial investments, our future conversations with voice assistants will be determined by their areas of expertise.