The days of typing search terms into a browser or clicking
through drop-down menus may be fading. Rising in their place is a much more
natural interface: voice.
Market research firm Gartner predicts consumer demand for
voice devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home will generate $3.5 billion by
2021.
Statistics regarding consumer adoption of these products are
staggering.
In January, Google announced it sold “more than one Google
Home device every second since Google Home Mini started shipping in October.”
Google Assistant - which powers all of the Google Home products (original, Mini
and Max) and also works on Android phones and tablets, iPhones, TVs and watches
- is now available on more than 400 million devices.
But Amazon still dominates the smart-speaker market, with
third-party research estimating the Alexa products control 76% of the total
user base. In December, Amazon said “tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices
sold worldwide” during the holiday season, and the Echo Dot was the top-selling
product from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon.
As consumers become more comfortable conversing with a
device for information and shopping, brands are investing more resources -
human and financial - to develop voice-enabled solutions.
In the fourth and final piece in our series on voice, we hear
from Expedia on how it is using voice and the limitations and opportunities of
the existing Alexa platform.
Background
Online travel agencies are technology companies as much - if
not more – than they are travel companies. So it’s no surprise many of them
devote a large portion of their resources in the form of time, money and
personnel to being on the forefront of emerging solutions.
Take Expedia for example. The company spends about $1.3
billion annually on technology. But at the same time, Expedia has “a massive
investment on the human side of things,” says vice president for global product
Brent Harrison. Its strategy is built on balancing the human touch with the
automation of technology, taking cues from its customers as to what best
meets their needs.
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In November 2016, Expedia launched its skill for Amazon’s
Alexa-enabled devices, enabling travelers to use their voice to search for
hotels and flights, add a rental car to an existing trip, check flight status
and details and review loyalty points.
It seems the natural next step would be to enable hotel and
flight booking capabilities. But Harrison says that while the company is
exploring this type of enhancement, it's not convinced consumers want to
use their smart speakers in that way.
“What we've observed to date is while it's great that we’ve
proven we can transact, the consumers en masse are not ready yet to be doing
that at the scale that we see on the web or on mobile apps,” Harrison says.
“Today voice-only I think leaves a little bit to be desired
for what can be a complicated, a higher-ticket item for many people and a more
considered purchase. I think those things will take time to develop.”
One segment that may be quicker to adopt voice booking: business travelers that make repeat bookings for identical itineraries. Telling
a device to “book the same flight I took last week for my trip to Boston and reserve
a room at the same hotel for three nights” is a logical and efficient use case.
Harrison also believes the development of more multi-mode
devices that offer both voice and visual output - such as the Echo Show that
debuted in June 2017 and the newer, smaller Echo Spot - may be what travel
brands such as Expedia need to provide the type of information that would lead
to a purchase.
"I could ask about hotels in Cancun and then I see what
it looks like. We're really intrigued by that idea,” he says.
Alexa 2.0?
Another impediment, he notes, to widespread consumer adoption
is the current clunky process of interacting with brands on the Alexa platform.
Users either need to be aware that a brand has a skill, or find it via search
in the Alexa Skills store, and then ask Alexa to enable it. To make full use of
Expedia’s Alexa capabilities, users must also then log into their Expedia
account.
“I think those are all friction points to consumer adoption
and usage today, particularly for travel companies because most travel
companies are not daily use cases - you know, it's not like weather or music or
sports or news or traffic,” Harrison says.
Understanding our consumer’s mindset and intent, that’s a gold mine.
Brent Harrison - Expedia
And unlike mobile apps, which require a similar intentional
action by the user to find, install and then use the app, an Alexa skill does
not provide a visual reminder. Even once the skill is enabled in the sytsem, the traveler must remember that it is there.
“I do think in time that maybe that distinction goes away,
and it will be more purely voice-activated conversation and you'll have access
to functionality for discovery, shopping, booking and managing your trip simply
by just talking and not necessarily by opening our skill as a first step,”
Harrison says.
If Harrison’s prediction is correct, it then raises the question
of how the Alexa platform would decide what response to return to the user.
One possibility could be something similar to Google’s
algorithmic-based results, but another, more interesting option could be one
designed as a “pay-to-play” marketplace.
“I want
flights to Las Vegas – whose result will show? That’s a very interesting
question. How do we - bringing it home to Expedia - make sure we are the source
of the best options for the consumers?” Harrison says.
Data discovery
For now, Harrison says Expedia is committed to working with
the Alexa platform – as opposed to creating their own voice solution – in large
part because of the market penetration of Amazon’s devices.
But another area where he sees potential for improvement is
in the collection and sharing of user data.
“Understanding our consumer’s mindset and intent, that’s a
gold mine,” he says, since they could use that information to drive future
product development. But for now, that is not part of the Alexa environment.
“Today Amazon gets all of that, and we see the successful
utterances or the things that come through, but we don't see anything outside
of our particular skill,” he says.
“So again, the user has to have the Expedia skill installed,
and they have to remember to invoke it before we have any line of sight into
their behaviors. There's no data sharing. We don't understand the user context.
We don't understand what else they're doing on these devices. We don't know if
they're visiting other travel sites.”
Harrison also sees a need to create a better process to
handle queries that the automated skill cannot understand or answer. For now,
there is not a way to connect the user to a human customer service agent.
“I think some of these fallbacks, these more graceful ways
of handling that are definitely an area of opportunity. It's not optimal today."