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" Voice continues its rise as the new user interface-and it's a global phenomenon. Half of online consumers now use a Digital Voice Assistant (DVA), with people in China, the UAE, India and Mexico leading the way. The use of standalone DVAs (ie smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod) in the United States has outstripped embedded DVA use in smartphones and other devices. Based on anticipated purchases, standalone DVA is now on track to be one of the fastest adopted technologies in US history. While there is concern around privacy and data collection from DVAs, if companies focus on establishing trust and transparency, they will see overall growth."

"These findings reinforce past studies that showed Google Assistant as the clear leader in voice responses, helped by Google's decades of work sorting and organizing internet search results. These studies shows that Google may remain the top contender in voice results for years to come, despite Amazon's work to hire thousands of Alexa engineers and its huge push to expand its voice assistant's capabilities. While Alexa still dominates the US smart speaker market, with about 70% of the devices sold already, Google continues to gain ground and could use its superior tech to eventually beat out Alexa."

"You can only understand the voice platform wars by first recognizing that voice assistants, specifically, represent both a platform and user interface (UI) shift comparable to the web and smartphones. The key difference is that these new platforms are neither based on open standards, nor on relatively open access to consumers. Voice assistants introduce a proprietary intermediary into all digital consumer interactions. This scenario both excites and frightens the leading tech companies that carved out enviable positions in the earlier web and smartphone platform wars." "Voicebot subsequently introduced the 5 A's framework for evaluating value segment dominance: Access, Acquisition, Authority, Attention, and Agency." "Each of these segments is again up for grabs in the new voice era. Voice assistants offer easy Access to content. They are being used to Acquire goods, and are a new source of Authority, as they answer billions of questions annually. They are also diverting Attention that previously went to smartphone interactions to new voice interaction properties. This means that each of the winners of the previous web and mobile platform wars has existing territory they must protect. " "Agency is what all of the big winners of the earlier tech platforms fear most. Voice assistants reserve agency for making choices about where answers are sourced (Authority), and can heavily influence content sourcing (Access), such as steering people toward Prime Video or YouTube. They also can order from multiple sources (Acquisition) that are not Amazon.com. And, they introduce new sources of interactions that displace consumer time with media (Attention). Voice assistants are an intermediary. " "Voice assistants are designed to help simplify users' lives. Over time, more and more agency will be granted to voice assistants to simply execute tasks on behalf of the user. The consumer will not necessarily care how the task is fulfilled, just that it gets done. " "If an agen