It seems that the Artificial intelligence (AI) is destined to be the Next technological revolution. Lately we have been seeing how the personal assistants digital are taking on greater relevance.

In recent months, we have seen the importance of implementing a chatbot service in companies, which have become very popular thanks to advances in technology and data processing.

But what is already revolutionizing the US market, and very soon the Spanish one, are Smart speakers (Smart speakers).

What are Smart Speakers?

A smart speaker is a wireless speaker and voice command device Which one is coming integrated with a virtual assistant and its artificial intelligence. What are these for Smart speakers they work properly they must be connected to a active Wi-Fi network.

According to a Bloomberg study, the most popular smart speakers on the market are: Echo from Amazon with 73% of the market, Google Home of Google with 14%, Sonos One of Sonos with 2% and HomePod of Apple with 10%.

Another report, in this case of Canalys, shows us the sales figures in the sector of smart speakers: During the first quarter of 2018, 3.2 million units of Google Home smart speakers and 2.5 million Amazon Echo speakers were sold.

It seems that this year both Amazon Echo and Google Home will arrive in Spain together with its built-in virtual assistants, Alexa in the case of Amazon and Google Assistant in the case of the Mountain View company.

A few months ago, Movistar also announced that it was preparing an artificial intelligence platform called Aura and that it could be used in 3 different ways: through mobile applications, using third-party channels such as Facebook, Google or Microsoft; and finally, thanks to a device called Home.

What are smart speakers for?

Smart speakers comprise, by means of a natural language thanks to technology-based algorithms (Machine learning) or (machine learning), the requests of their users, in this way they manage to respond more optimally to their questions.

According to data from Statista, The most common uses of Smart Speakers on the part of users are: Listening to music (68%), finding out about the weather (58%), asking general questions (52%), such as: where to dine, finding an Italian restaurant nearby, meeting the author of a book, how to prepare a dish, and many others.

At best, the examples mentioned above of virtual assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant may seem uninteresting to you, but for companies, it's a great opportunity.

Many brands have already noticed the potential that smart speakers can have in the long term, which is why they have already started to adopt bots quite quickly.

Why are smart speakers a great opportunity for your company?

When you see that everyone starts talking to Bots And, because large companies are implementing chatbots, this means that there is a new untapped market. These new technologies are not just a trend, but they appear to stay and offer new forms of communication between company and customer.

La user opinion who have had the opportunity to interact with Alexa, the bot that runs on the Amazon Echo speaker, are very satisfied. Some point out that they can use it without having to have technological knowledge.

El The purpose of the chatbot is to help the user in every sense, and a good way is through the voice being one of the best forms of communication.

For example, if we have a smart speaker with a virtual assistant in our company's office we can ask for sales results instead of having a person perform an analysis, we can also ask the speaker to write down a task to assign to a colleague, ask for the days we have left on vacation, check which of our sellers achieved the most sales last month...

Chatbots versus Smart Speakers

Most of the chatbots we have seen so far are textual, for example: Facebook Messenger, chats on websites, on Whatsapp, etc. They are very accessible and easy to use, but surely if we could talk to them, everything would be simpler because they are our natural way of communicating.

We don't think that companies should choose between one technology or another, chatbots can perfectly coexist with voice assistants. We should only consider the advantages and disadvantages of each chatbot technology and to know in what situations we can use each one.

Big brands such as Google and Amazon have been able to take advantage of both technological trends.

La Amazon Echo Alexa voice technology it now allows you to integrate chatbots. Smart speakers, in this case Alexa, include voice recognition, text recognition, and conversational interactions.

Now, Technology companies can quickly create voice-based chat interfaces or text for your apps interactively like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant.

What does a voice assistant need to provide a good user experience?

Speak the user's language correctly:

El speech recognition And the natural language understanding is key. We must educate the voice assistant through deep learning features, to convert speech into text and natural language understanding for recognize the intention of the text, which will allow us to create applications with realistic conversational interactions.

Recognize the voice and convert it to text:

El The assistant must understand the language, your voice, the accent, the intention of what we are talking about, what is being said, try to understand the context and answer in a natural way.

Reply quickly:

Users want a quick and accurate answer, and they don't like to wait. The more trained the virtual assistant is, the faster it will respond.

Make no mistake in the answer:

The virtual assistant must not be wrong in the answers. In this case, if they give the wrong answer, we must enter new data to help the bot learn.

Have up-to-date information:

Chatbots and virtual assistants need to be up to date and constantly “learn”. Actions should be defined (intents) that the bot must comply with. Each intention must add Examples of phrases.

This would be the goal that smart speakers would be heading towards. They will have to be able to hold a conversation, remember previous questions and detect context.

At this time, Google and Apple are the clear winners when it comes to virtual assistants on smartphones, have dominated the market thanks to their operating systems, but things change when we talk about who is the winner in the household. Amazon Echo dominates the market in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany thanks to its Alexa virtual assistant. We will be watching for Google Home, which seems to be gaining ground on Amazon Echo.

For now, 16% of Spaniards say they use one of the virtual assistants available on their mobile phones, such as Apple's Siri, or Google Assistant.

How can we help you?

If you need more information, do not hesitate to contact us.