Amazon dominates travel brands’ ongoing experiments with voice technology

Travel brands have only just started putting in voice-first services and currently Amazon has a clear first-mover advantage thanks to its Alexa and Echo products says EyeforTravel’s new free report. 

Amazon made a canny move in becoming the first major company to roll out and heavily market smart speakers. This first-mover advantage has made Alexa the go-to for the travel industry’s initial attempts to deploy voice technology finds EyeforTravel’s new Can Voice Change the Way We Travel? Report, which is free to download now.

It’s easy to see why travel brands are largely teaming up with Amazon as it has by far and away the most popular smart speaker in terms of sales currently. Amazon has at least 70% of the market share currently according to estimates and substantially beating out Google Home in terms of web search interest in 2016 and 2017. Even more importantly its Alexa personal assistant, as they have made it part of their strategy to focus on the supporting ecosystem and bring in external developers. This has allowed Alexa to grow the number of ‘skills’, or programmed tasks and apps on the system, exponentially across 2017 from around 7,000 to more than 25,000 by the end of the year.

Hotels are putting their own offerings among these skills, as are metasearch companies, airports, online travel agencies, and airlines. This covers a multitude of brands, including KAYAK, United Airlines, Marriott, IHG, Best Western, Skyscanner, Edwardian Hotels, Heathrow Airport, and Kimpton. Hotels are probably the most prominent users of Amazon Alexa and Echo speakers currently as there is an obvious use case for in-room speakers that act as concierges.

For IHG, they have begun testing their own virtual concierge through Alexa. However, they found that the human element was still critical, using their call centre to train, “Central Reservation Offices (CROs) have been trying to manage a downward cycle in that not many people are calling them anymore, but they know a ton about the way people actually talk, their cadence and what they ask for,” said Bill Keen, IHG’s VP of mobile solutions & digital guest experience at EyeforTravel North America 2017. “Through voice listening tools they actually powered our initial Alexa implementation in the hotel rooms, where we actually had a repository of things that guests normally ask when they call the call centre desk and we could actually build it into.”

However, current adoption trends doesn’t mean Amazon will have its own way for the foreseeable future. Multiple players are eyeing the opportunities that voice afford, including Baidu, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet/Google. “I’m a huge Alexa fan, but I think Google is going to have a big advantage as they have a lot of the context,” said Paul English, CEO of Lola Tech. “When you do a simple query to Google Home, it can piece together all of that.” This data advantage appears already to be having an effect as independent research has found that Google Assistant is more accurate in coming up with spoken answers than any competitors. Similarly, Chinese rivals have made huge progress and claim that their systems are now more effective at transcribing than native Mandarin speakers.

It therefore remains to be seen whether Amazon can keep its lead but right now it is the biggest player in terms of dedicated voice applications being built by the travel industry.

For more on the topic of voice and its impact on the travel industry, click here to download the complete report for free. You can also download our free report on in-room technology, including smart speakers here.

Are Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft falling behind Chinese voice tech?

China is a crucible for the spread of voice technologies and domestic companies might be leading the world currently in this field says EyeforTravel’s new free report into voice. 

Unique dynamics make China a perfect laboratory for developing and deploying voice technologies. This is propelling local players, principally Baidu and iFlytek, to become world leaders finds EyeforTravel’s new Can Voice Change the Way We Travel? report.

China is likely to become the key market for voice technologies and one in which travel brands need to be paying attention due to a number of reasons. Firstly, is the Chinese language, which has thousands of individual characters rather than a conventional alphabet. This makes typing a challenge, particularly on the smaller screen of a smartphone, creating a clear need that voice can solve. Furthermore, Chinese travellers are far more mobile focused than travellers in other markets according to EyeforTravel’s Chinese Travel Consumer report.

Progress in voice technologies means that voice technology is already the most convenient way for Mandarin speakers to operate their smartphones. A joint Baidu, Stanford University and University of Washington study from 2016 found it was three times quicker to say English words than type, and 2.8 times faster with Mandarin, while the rate of mistakes was a fifth lower using English and almost two-thirds lower with Mandarin.

This creates the demand for voice to flourish in the Chinese market, but local players have further advantages of a supportive Chinese government that has made AI a core focus and a more amenable regulatory environment for this field of research. Data that can be collected, analyzed and deployed with far fewer legal data security and privacy restrictions than in the EU or the US. This could be key, as the quantity of data is key in this kind of machine learning, especially as engineers tackle the next challenge of getting AI to understand and respond to speech in a contextual framework. 

That data is already being generated by millions of Chinese consumers. Whilst Apple claims Siri has a userbase of around 375 million, likely making it the most used personal assistant outside of China, China’s leading player at the moment iFLYTEK claims more than 700 million end users, which they believe gives them more than 70% of the Chinese voice market. Media reports more widely quote a figure of around 500 million regular users, still a vast figure.

iFLYTEK’s main competitor in China Baidu is hot on their heels, and claims prodigious growth as a result of pouring around USD3 into AI research from 2015 to 2017. In a November 2016 release, they noted that that “the daily requests for speech recognition grew from 5 million in 2013 to 140 million this year, and the number of daily requests for speech synthesis stands today at 200 million.”

Crucially, both companies have also been able to establish an ecosystem of various players who depend on their software, unlike Apple and Siri. This enables them to extend the reach of their rising voice empires and gather more data to further improve accuracy. Both companies claim that thousands of companies have already developed products from their voice technologies.

So, the big tech players in the West have plenty to feel anxious about given the progress of their Chinese counterparts and the scene is only going to get more crowded as Samsung started to push its Bixby voice products in the second half of 2017.

Therefore, if there is one key market that travel brands need to keep an eye on in relation to vice technology developments, it is China. The already deep penetration of advanced technologies, alongside unique market dynamics and a language particularly well suited to voice applications seems likely to make the country the forefront for this new way of engaging with the digital world.

For more on the topic of voice and its impact on the travel industry, click here to download the complete report for free.

Can voice technology change the travel industry?

It’s the biggest topic in tech, with the giants piling in to voice-focused artificial intelligences, meaning travel brands need to sit up and take notice finds a new free report.

EyeforTravel’s new Can Voice Change the Way We Travel? report advises travel brands to get ready for the expansion of voice technologies, as although these are at an early adopter stage, they are already important parts of the digital ecosystem and developing at a breakneck pace.   

Blockbuster sales of smart speakers over the holiday periods in both 2016 and 2017, alongside a steadily growing number of connected devices per home across major markets in the last half decade, have demonstrated an appetite for voice products. Even more critically than the smart speaker market, personal assistants are being incorporated into ever more platforms, meaning a market of billions of devices already exists.

Estimates of voice’s market share in terms of search are harder to come by than device sales but this too is growing rapidly, nowhere more so than China. Already, the leading players, Baidu and iFlytek, claim that users are making hundreds of millions of daily requests through voice, allowing them to gather vast amounts of data. This base has allowed both companies to put together voice products that can recognise speech at accuracy rates of up to 98%.

This growing accuracy demonstrates the rapid progress in the field and how the technology is on the cusp of being able to transcribe human speech perfectly. However, for travel where the real issue lies according to the report, is not in the technology to comprehend the human voice, but the ability to personalize the experience. Comprehension is one thing but context and cogent answers are quite another, which will require another leap in performance.

“When you do a normal screen based search, a whole screen of information comes up – but on a voice based search there isn’t time for Siri, Echo or Home to read out the whole page,” Sam Turner, sales director of Hotelbeds Group told EyeforTravel. “A much more personalised response is required to give you the most relevant information only, and nothing more, otherwise it simply doesn’t work.”

Paul English, CEO of Lola Tech, believes that “ultimately talking to your phone and saying I want a hotel tomorrow night and I am going to be in Chicago Thursday and then having it know enough about the context and enough about the personalization requirements that it does everything for you” is the future.

Getting to a more personalised service will require a concerted effort on the part of travel brands in terms of data gathering, interpretation and presentation. Therefore, consumers conducting a full cycle of travel research solely through voice remain some way off.

In the meantime, travel brands are finding a variety of uses for voice products to ease the travellers’ journeys. Heathrow airport is experimenting with smart speakers in flight screens and key locations in the airport to help travellers with common questions. For hotels, Marriott, IHG, Best Western and Kimpton are among the pioneers in the sector. Principally these brands are looking at using speakers in guests’ rooms to provide services and ease guest requests. Bill Keen, IHG’s VP of mobile solutions & digital guest experience, reported that they had implemented Alexa into and enthused about its further potential: “Voice is sexy again. I do believe that’s the next interface for us.” For luxury hotel brand Edwardian, they have gone a step further and developed out their self-developed chatbot so now it has been enabled to speak to guests and the leadership team is looking at their own in-room speaker tech.

For more on the topic of voice and its impact on the travel industry, click here to download the complete report for free.