What Happened
With a major software upgrade, Google’s smart speaker Home can now recognize up to six different users by voice. This addition of multi-user support means that Google Home can now tailor its answers for each user and know which account to pull data to match who is asking. Google Home users can easily train it to recognize different voices by repeating “Ok, Google” twice, the recording of which is then analyzed by a neural network and stored locally for future references. Multi-user support is rolling out in the U.S. today and will expand to the U.K. over the next few weeks. Users must update their Google Home app to enable multi-user support.
What Brands Need To Do
In contrast to voice assistants on smartphones that are meant for one individual user, smart home devices are meant to serve multiple users in the same household. Adding multi-user support is a great way to expand the uses cases for Google Home and gives it a competitive edge to Amazon Echo or other voice assistants. It also gives Google a way to collect more personal data and help it improve the voice experiences that Home provides. As voice-activated smart home devices continue to mature and proliferate the market, more and more consumers at home will become reachable and individually addressable. Brands need to prepare for that future by starting to develop a conversational strategy today.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: The Verge
