The Voice 2021, an interview with Jérôme Malzac, Chief Innovation Officer, on the voice trends of this year.
Conversation, regulation and personal data are intimately linked. Indeed, after a few years of experimentation, voice is becoming structured and professionalized by integrating privacy and personal data issues into its ecosystem.
Personalization of assistants at the heart of brands' concerns
More and more brands are equipping themselves with a personal assistant to help their customers, answer their questions, allow them to choose from the proposed offer and this 24/24 & 7/7.
In this context, brands seek to differentiate themselves by creating a true vocal identity. The depth of the voice, its tone or timbre are all characteristics that transmit and build a brand image.
We would recognize among 1000 voices, the one of Simone Hérault who announces us the platform or the delay of our train!
The same is true for voice assistants or Interactive Voice Servers (IVS) from now on.
Several solutions allow today to synthesize real voices to use them in voice assistants such as :
The web giant recently updated its conversational and voice bricks with several announcements:
- The implementation of an offer dedicated to call centers
- The addition of an advanced statistics module on its conversational bricks:
- And here again, the possibility to customize the google voice by using the creation of digitalized voices!
5. Speech to text in opensource mode with the Mozilla foundation!
The Mozilla foundation wants to create open-source libraries to make Speech-To-Text and Text-To-Speech in free version!
To achieve this, they need to enrich their AI with many examples of voices, accents, languages and pronunciations!
If you want to support them and record some sentences to help them progress, go here: https://voice.mozilla.org/
6. The voice as a biometric element
And finally, it is quite interesting to see how some laboratories and start-ups are betting on the voice as a biometric factor of tomorrow to validate a payment or to avoid having to give your customer number to the telephone service...
Your voice may be your identity card of tomorrow (beware of colds and voice extinction).
Voice assistants: what is at stake for privacy?
- Intimate, potentially sensitive data
- Recording devices increasingly present in shared spaces
- Devices that involve many actors
- Eavesdropping for product improvement purposes
- False positives and outsiders: the question of consent and control of one's data
The implementation of conversational projects raises many issues on the subject of respect for personal data and privacy. It is therefore important to keep in mind a few good reflexes when designing/creating this type of project:
1. Maintain the essential points of explanation: if you want to focus too much on the implementation of a seamless user experience, you must not forget to keep moments of choice and sharing in the conversational pathway that require the user's attention. It is essential to present the reality of data processing and use to users during the exchange.
2. Favour local over cloud: as much as possible, implement functionalities and data processing directly in local devices (without calling on external systems), which gives the user reassurance and is a factor of trust and acceptability.
3. Ensure control: allow the user to understand the uses of their data and to set the parameters of the device according to their choices.
4. Adapting to the voice medium: relying on exclusively audio interfaces raises major challenges in terms of presenting information to the user, obtaining his consent or implementing means of control. It is therefore necessary to conduct an in-depth UX reflection on the right way to do it.
