Voice assistant study: "Marketing industry on the verge of a revolution".

Restraint is not the analysts' thing at the American tech consultant Capgemini. Voice assistants such as Apple's "Siri", Google's "Alexa" or Amazon's "Echo", they state in a new Study would not "just" change the marketing industry in the near future. No: a veritable revolution is imminent. How do you arrive at this assessment? And what does this mean for companies - and end consumers - in Switzerland?

A completely new way of interacting

The Capgemini study shows that consumers are developing a strong preference for interacting with companies via voice assistants. Around a quarter (24%) of the more than 5,000 respondents worldwide said they would rather use a voice assistant than a website. In the next three years, this figure is likely to rise to up to 40 percent, with just under one in five (18 percent) stating that they prefer to consult a voice assistant rather than go to a store or bank branch. This means that customers are bringing companies "into their homes" of their own accord - and above all out of convenience. According to the study, this creates a "more instinctive way for consumers to engage with brands".

"Boundary-less commerce"

Shopping is therefore no longer limited to a store or a website: boundary-less commerce is on the rise. There are already concrete examples of this in the USA: according to Capgemini, more than forty large department stores (including market leaders such as Walmart, Target and Costco) are participating in a project that enables orders to be placed via voice commands using "Google Home", benefiting from the fact that customers are more relaxed and generous with their spending in the home environment - and want to reorder groceries immediately when they run out, for example. The companies that can be most easily controlled with the voice assistant are therefore doing the business.

The users: Relatively young, relatively wealthy

The Capgmenini report also shows that voice assistants are most popular among 33 to 45-year-olds. These are often people who already see technology as part of their everyday lives and expect to be relieved by using a voice assistant. In addition, typical users are relatively affluent: around a fifth of those surveyed stated that they have an annual gross income of more than 100,000 US dollars.

Opportunities for Swiss companies too

Of course, voice assistants are still at an early stage of development - especially when it comes to linking them with e-commerce. For a truly intuitive user experience in Switzerland, they would have to learn to understand dialect, for example. However, it is technically possible to adapt to linguistic specifics: the word accuracy rate of Amazon's Alexa, for example, increased by more than 20 percent between 2013 and 2017. People who speak English (Alexa's native language, if you like) are currently benefiting the most from this. However, this shows that the underlying recognition processes can be refined, which is another reason why marketing professionals in Switzerland need to start thinking now about how they could integrate voice assistants into their sales concepts. If they wait until the technology has become widely established, they will deprive themselves of the opportunity to gain significant competitive advantages.