Robots communicating via voice.

Virtual assistants turn 16 this year and you dont have to look too hard - or speak too loudly - to find them. In fact, there will be around 8 billion voice-based devices by 2023 - more than the worlds population today. From Amazons Echo and Googles Assistant to Apples Siri, Samsungs Bixby and Microsofts Cortana, billions of people around the world are using their voices every day to schedule appointments, get directions, play music or get answers quickly all things that once required us to tediously type or write. Even Twitter recently announced that users can now audio tweet their inner musings.

And yet, despite widespread adoption of voice-based devices in our personal lives, applications based on voice are nowhere as pervasive in our professional lives as they are in our homes. One could argue that consumer technology leads the way in changing human behavior and that the consumerization of the enterprise is always driven first by an expectation that work tools should be equally as convenient as personal technology solutions. Take, for example, AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, which started in the late 90s. It wasnt until they reached peak consumer adoption that consumers started expecting communication with coworkers to be just like chatting with their friends; twenty years later, Slack was born.

Voice will be no different. As we gradually use voice as the standard medium of interaction between ourselves and technology in our personal lives, we will start to see an increasing demand for similar technologies in our professional lives. Steve McLendon, news product lead for voice at Google argues that we see voice as the ubiquitous always with you platform that allows you to do things in the real world. As a data point, Gartner predicts 25 percent of workers will use some voice-based technology daily by 2021. Thats not surprising given that the percentage of CIOs already using, or immediately planning to use, virtual customer assistants rose 10 points to 31 percent between 2018 and 2019 [Source: Gartner, Market Guide for Virtual Customer Assistants, Brian Manusama, Bern Elliot, Magnus Revang, Anthony Mullen, 11 July, 2019]. And while virtual customer assistants can process both text and voice, some technologists forecast that speech will become the standard medium of interaction between people and their computers.

In addition, there have been some incredible advancements in technology, making this precisely the right time for enterprise applications of voice to take off. Historically, most voice-based technologies have fallen short of expectations. This is because the typical method of understanding voice is to first collect data, then transcribe and label data to provide structure and lastly, build a machine learning model on top. The issue often comes with acquiring a high enough volume of labeled data, which often serves as a bottleneck.

Most recently, theres been amazing progress in natural language understanding. Natural language models from Google, Facebook, and OpenAI are starting to outperform humans on a variety of basic tasks. These new pre-trained and open source models allow users to fine-tune their needs using much smaller amounts of labeled data. OpenAIs latest model, GPT-3, is material progress towards eliminating the need for fine-tuning entirely. While this research is still in its infancy, it has the potential to eliminate some of the rigidity of voice applications as they exist today and open new ways of understanding and utilizing voice.

Unlocking New Opportunities for Voice Applications with AI

While embracing voice as a technology platform for business applications is not a new initiative, efforts have been quite limited to date. Early applications existed mostly in recording and transcribing calls, such as doctors putting notes in EMRs.

However, with the advancements in AI technology, the applications of analyzing voice move these solutions from a nice-to-have feature to a system of record which can unlock opportunities for revenue growth, costs savings and retaining talent, just to name a few.

Here are some specific areas where the combination of voice and AI are proving to be a powerful duo.

Its almost paradoxical that while we have a myriad of communication tools like email, Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS and others, the single most efficient way to transfer information is still by voice. Take for example, explaining a complicated issue or having a difficult conversation; speaking live is always the best medium. Language is, in fact, the original, most important tool setting our species apart from any other. It empowers our most complex capabilities and underlies the achievements of civilization. And now we are finally poised to truly unleash it in an intelligible, logical digital form, allowing entrepreneurs to create unimagined new solutions and solve our societys most pressing problems.

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Voice + AI Is Coming To The Workplace Loud And Clear - Forbes