Voice assistants are becoming the norm. According to Statista.com, the number of digital voice assistants in the wild will rise to 8.4 billion in 2024. Currently, the number is estimated to be about 4.2 billion.

The two most widely recognized devices with a voice assistant; are smartphones and smart speakers. However, the use cases for both differ wildly. Smartphones are by definition more personal devices, and smart speakers are usually meant for anyone to use. Smartphones are meant to be taken wherever you go and smart speakers lie on the kitchen table or bedside table.

What does this difference mean?

The initial capabilities of Voice Assistants were developed “in-house”, by Amazon, Google, Apple, and other Voice Assistant creators.  However, many new abilities are being added by brand owners building Voice Apps. Anyone can use these Voice Apps, just by saying the name of the Voice App, sometimes referred to as an Invocation Name or Verbal Domain Name. And, as you might imagine, naming these Voice Apps is causing a problem for brands. Let’s look at why a brand should secure its Invocation Name ASAP.

Both Amazon and Google have recently improved how their Voice Assistants sound.  Amazon added additional reading styles and Google added two new English voices.  You can read about the improvements that Amazon made in a previous blog post titled “The Voices are Getting Better”.   In this blog post, we will focus on recent improvements Google made to how Google Assistant sounds.  For Google Actions, Google previously provided four English voices, two male voices, and two female voices.  Google recently added two additional voices for a total of six-voice options.  The two new voices sound significantly more natural.

Let’s hear what they sound like.

According to a Google study published in 2018, nearly 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile. And in a 2020 report titled Hearables Consumer Adoption Report 2020, the “Voicebot consumer surveys showed growth of 103% of voice assistant use through hearables during the period. That translated into 43.7 million U.S. adults in 2020 up from 21.5 million in 2018.”

The Voice Assistant is moving from the Smart Speaker and Smartphone, into other devices like smartwatches, smart rings, and even wireless headphones and earbuds.  Wearables or Hearables, are making it even easier to access digital Voice Assistants.

Today, nearly every pair of wireless earbuds or headphones you buy has the option to call on a voice assistant. This has expanded the use of voice assistants and opened up a world of possibilities. Let’s examine that.