Google must win voice to survive, argues The Works founder Nicol
Google must become the market leader in voice tech to ensure its very survival, warns one of Australia’s leading experts on the subject.
Douglas Nicol, founder of chatbot agency OnMsg and creative agency The Works, claims the Android owner’s reliance on sponsored search results means it’s more vulnerable than its competitors such as Amazon and Apple.
Typically, voice products mine information from only the top-ranked search result when posed a question, leading to the dilemma of how paid-for adverts are dealt with.
He was talking on a new Mumbrella and Exponential sponsored podcast series, which has gone live today. To listen, click the link above or subscribe via iTunes here.
The show is hosted by Mumbrella regular and ex-Clemenger strategist Al Crawford and other panellists include Nick Abrahams, the global head of technology and innovation for legal firm Norton Rose Fulbright, and Exponential’s global sales strategy director Tyler Greer.
“There’s a lot of companies that will lose a lot if they don’t win the war to own interface with AI,” Nicol warns.
“They all hate each other. I would suspect for Google it’s a matter of survival to win voice because they still earn 80 per cent of their revenue through AdWords. If they are disintermediated by another smart speaker, then suddenly their rivers of gold have gone.
“Voice isn’t just ‘nice to have’ – it’s mission critical for these organisations to stay alive.”
Nicol’s company The Works and its sister agency OnMsg have become one of the country’s dominant forces in artificial intelligence, collaborating with giants including Facebook, Foxtel and Optus.
Meanwhile, Exponential’s Tyler Greer – who has previously written on the topic for Mumbrella – thinks the market will decide which tech giant will win based on whether consumers prefer services such as shopping, mapping or social networks.
“Look at the branding for phones now, it’s not about making calls, it’s about the camera,” he says. “That utility became elevated above almost everything else on what is effectively a telephone.
“There’s going to be a particular utility in the voice sphere that matters to people more than anything else and whoever can have ownership of that will probably have us for just about everything.
“If that’s shopping, Amazon will have a leg up on everybody else and they can build out their offering there, but at least they have a starting point for their revenue model.
“But if it’s your home operation, search or mapping, then Google has the best foothold. Once that is established, then it’s for brands to understand how best to operate within that new ecosystem.”
Abrahams argues that Google has wisely taken an early lead in Australia by making a “land grab” for people’s living rooms.
“Google have got a lot of devices already out. Maybe they’re soaking up the early adopter market to get a jump on Amazon in this country that they didn’t get in America?”
Other topics covered in the podcast include whether voice could lead to the death of challenger brands and how aware consumers are of the data they are giving away.
Hey Douglas, so do you think that search will be replaced by voice? I doubt that. Might be big, but all evidence (outside of your Gartner headlines) points to incremental volume in search rather than taking away from existing. Just food for thought. Google’s biz may stay the same size and dollars come from elsewhere…
Text search ain’t going away!
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Ever since Google now appeared in software update in 2012 i have used it for searches around 70% of the time even throwing away my yellow pages years ago, if i say to google call a place i dont have in my phone it searches the web finds it and places the call all since 2012. Now relatives and friends who now have google assistant all use it as well. When someone sees the ease of useing these actions they dont go back. Web results show Google is the smartest assistant already, so im pretty sure this will just get better. Apple just lured a top AI google employee to their side, because siri simply sucks, a fact.
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