Why the Human Voice Is the Year’s Most Important Technology

I’m a technologist neither by profession nor by training, but I know a tech trend when I hear one. And I heard one loudly and clearly amidst the roaring clatter of this year’s massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The human voice is in its ascendancy.

We are witnessing two concurrent phenomena:

1. As smartphones increase in size, speed, and capability, mobile devices are continuing to replace traditional computers and tablets across a wide variety of tasks and usage. Our media-consumption habits are likewise evolving as a result. With smaller screens, we may not yet be reading less (and this writer fervently hopes we never do), but we are emphatically listening more.
2. In the age of the internet of things, we will be adapting to a fully screen-free relationship with most of our devices. One doesn’t type a request to Alexa, Siri, or Cortana — one speaks it. One doesn’t read a response; one listens to it. Such will be the case for the smart, connected devices we will all interact with across our homes and offices in a future that will arrive much sooner than you may have expected.

We are entering a transformative period in our relationship with both our personal and professional technology, one in which our reliance on text to both command and consume will be increasingly supplemented — and in many cases supplanted — by our reliance on speech. Interestingly, this trend even appears to hold in our relationships with the only screens in our lives that are growing larger. And the days when your voice-activated GPS and speech-to-text converters understood every third word at best? That was so 10 minutes ago.

Is this a profound change? It certainly has the potential to be. Marketers and media professionals already recognize the growing (and, indeed, returning) power of storytelling. We hear and see it throughout native advertising and custom content; it is even more deliberately on display in the rising popularity of podcasts and other forms of spoken audio.

And the human voice, of course, is the original storytelling device. For many of us, it has never had an equal. If you are in the business of interacting with customers, you should be thinking deeply about how your communications and marketing strategies will need to evolve in the age of sound.