Marcus Hadfield of mobile technology company Apadmi, talks about commutes, Alexa and voice search, as he explains how voice technology could improve the lives of Manchester citizens (and businesses) in the year ahead.
Wherever you look in the centre of Manchester, you see cranes.
New housing, new offices. Start-ups, scale-ups and off-the-scale businesses are choosing our city as a base.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced it was moving to the Northern Quarter and creating 1,000 new jobs.
We’ve got the chance to be a truly global tech city – this is great news. Mainly.
Mainly, because this growth is coming at a cost.
More people, more journeys, more cars, same trains. It’s getting worse for all commuters into the city.
In fact, I worked out that the time it takes me to get to work increased by an average of 20 minutes in 2018. 40 minutes a day…er, hang on… about 160 extra hours sat in the car. That’s a lot of podcasts, music and radio.
There’s no sign of anything getting better in the short term, so the question is “how to use that time more effectively?”. There’s only so much Adam Buxton, Scandinavian disco and arguing politicians anyone can take.
Well, perhaps our new neighbours from Amazon and the other tech giants can improve things for the drivers. If 2018 saw mass adoption of their voice-enabled devices in the home, 2019 should see an even greater reach and increase in the value of virtual assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google as they start to appear in our cars.
Making life better with voice tech
Amazon’s Echo Auto is set to be just $50 in the US and will be released early next year in the UK – and it will be a game changer for bored, frustrated, time-wasting drivers like me.
We can have a more valuable journey. Balances can be checked, bills can be paid, diaries adjusted as we crawl into the city.
But there’s a lot more to it than that. Suddenly, brands and businesses will have a new, hands-free, interface that reaches a massive captive audience, twice a day.
Voice search is already growing every year – it’s not difficult to claim that this will soar once every vehicle is loaded with a virtual assistant. (According to Comscore, voice will account for 50% of all searches by 2020).
Outdoor advertising can, and should, adapt to this quickly.
Next year, people in slow-moving cars in every direction of the M60 can find out more information about the holidays that will take them somewhere else for a while.
Drivers stuck on the A6 will add things to their online shopping lists based on the poster they’ve been staring at for two minutes. Voice search experts should be rubbing their hands.
What does it mean for Manchester businesses and beyond?
It goes way further than shopping and information.
Smart, forward-thinking organisations should already be thinking about how they can tap into this hugely valuable audience by creating skills that help them.
There’s the obvious stuff – turn the heating up, switch the oven on, add things to to-do lists – but the opportunities to delight and engage with this ever-growing and ever-slowing audience are far, far greater.
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