Google and Amazon are Wrong About Voice

Speech recognition is a hot topic. Google just announced new features for its voice assistant like continued conversation and multiple actions. Amazon Alexa has been leading the way in voice-enabled shopping. Both companies are making vast improvements, but they're missing the big picture.

Voice assistants are not the future of voice.

Voice assistants will be a component for consumers, but the sleeping giant is speech recognition for businesses. By 2020, there will be more than 169 billion calls made to businesses per year. Businesses currently invest large amounts in software to track and personalize the customer journey, but they're blind when it comes to those calls with their customers. Why? Most speech recognition is terrible.

Much of speech recognition has been optimized for one-way, short-form conversations like those delivered to an assistant.

Speech recognition hasn't been trained to handle real-life use cases. So, when you're calling your insurance company from the side of a busy freeway, the resulting data may look something like this: