Still, I can not believe what he says Capgemini, has asked more than 12,000 consumers using wizards virtual voice or text / chat regarding products and services companies in the automotive, consumer products and retail, and banking and insurance in 10 countries -United States, Sweden, Italy, India, Netherlands, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany and Norway-, and a thousand executives of organizations operating in the aforementioned sectors, including companies that work exclusively by Internet.

The study shows that consumers increasingly prefer to interact with Voice assistants than with human beings, especially when it comes to inquiring about products, obtaining information about new services or tracking their orders. According to the report, about 70% of consumers surveyed say that, over the next three years, they will gradually replace visits to physical stores, dealerships or the bank with smart speakers.

On the other hand, companies, Capgemini says, are already seeing the benefits of conversational assistants and place them as a fundamental element for loyalty and, in general, to enrich the customer experience. More than three – quarters of companies (76%) report having achieved quantifiable benefits of initiatives implementation of voice assistants or text/chat in their processes, and 58% say that those benefits have covered and even exceeded their expectations. Among these advantages is the reduction in more than 20% of the costs of customer service.

However, the report shows that the pace of development and effective implementation of virtual assistants by companies is lagging behind the intensity of consumer enthusiasm and demand. According to the study, less than 50% of the world’s top 100 organizations in the automotive, consumer and retail and banking and insurance sectors have voice assistants; and the same can be said for text assistants/chats.

The report also shows that consumers value the increasing capacity of conversational assistants to improve their experience. In 2017, 61% expressed their satisfaction with the use of the virtual voice assistant, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa or Siri, on their smartphones; a proportion that rises to 72% in the 2019 study. In addition, in 2017 46% of consumers declared themselves satisfied with the use of a smart speaker , such as Google Home or Amazon Echo, and 44%, with an assistant Voice with smart screen, such as Amazon Echo Show and Amazon Fire TV; figures that grow to 64% and 57% in 2019, respectively.

“Once the trust with virtual assistants has been carved out, consumers are willing to move to a new level in their relationship of use, with higher levels of personalization, emotional connection and value,” says the consultant’s report. More than two thirds (68%) of consumers value that a voice assistant allows performing several tasks simultaneously in hands-free mode and 59%, that text/chat assistants are continuously improving the level of customization. The study also shows that users aspire to a more humane interaction with their assistants: 58% would like to be able to personalize voice assistants, for example, by giving them a name (55%) or defining their personality (53%).

The report also identifies four critical factors that companies must consider taking advantage of this growing consumer interest in conversational interfaces: finding the right balance between human and robotic interactions to establish stronger and lasting relationships with the customer; provide conversational assistants with additional features, such as images and videos; dedicate more efforts to gain consumer confidence by solving friction points, offering individualized information of greater interest to each user, and designing and selecting use cases that demonstrate the positive impact on the experience compared to other business criteria ; and develop skills in user experience design, architecture / technology and regulatory compliance.

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Amazon, Google and Apple have been involved in a privacy controversy related to the recording and analysis of their users in order to improve the services provided in their virtual assistants. These controls, carried out by people manually, were carried out to a very small fraction of the population but some employees said they had heard private conversations from customers and the three companies have presented initiatives to improve data protection.

After the controversy, Amazon has made a change in the privacy policy of its assistant Alexa, according to Bloomberg and is collected in the assistant’s app. Users will have the option to exclude themselves from quality control and withdraw their recordings from the sample analyzed by Amazon staff, in the settings menu of the Alexa mobile application.

Amazon will include a disclaimer in the ‘ Alexa privacy ‘ section of the configuration and then in the ‘ Manage how your data improves Alexa ‘ section. The company details that the feature, which can be deactivated, “allows Amazon to use the messages you send with Alexa to improve transcription accuracy.”

With the change in its policies, Amazon explains that voice recordings “can be used to develop new features and manually reviewed to help improve our services.” “Only an extremely small fraction of voice recordings are reviewed manually,” the company clarifies.

By deactivating this feature, Amazon warns its users that ” voice recognition and new features may not work well for you .”

Apple and Google also take action

Apple announced last Thursday that it had decided to suspend the qualification process of Siri globally and that they will give the option to choose whether they wanted to participate in the qualification process or not in a future update. The controversy of the breach of Apple’s privacy policy with the Guardian publication that informed that an employee had had access to conversations that included private and sensitive user information was the cause of this policy change.

Google has also confirmed that it suspends audio transcription within the European Union for three months from August 1. This decision has been taken before the administrative process initiated by the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Hamburg (Germany) to prohibit the evaluations of the Voice Assistants and Google Home speakers. This process has been questioned for the breach of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union.

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