Voice + AI is Coming to the Workplace Loud and Clear

Virtual assistants turn 16 this year and you don’t 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 world’s population today. From Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Assistant to Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s Bixby and Microsoft’s 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.