Conversational Interfaces
Remember how everyone in Star Trek talked to the ship’s computer? That was great, and it is where business computing is heading, but we’re not there yet. At home, people talk to personal assistants like Siri and Alexa and others but what’s happening about voice interfaces at work? It turns out that it is likely much closer than you think.
Home First

As with smartphones, years ago, consumer use leads business use for personal assistants. According to Insider Intelligence (eMarketer), a market research company, this year, approximately:
- 24% will use Google Assistant
- 23% will use Apple’s Siri
- 21% will use Amazon’s Alexa
That’s 68% of households! Your experience at the office lags far behind, but maybe not for long.
Voice at Work
A range of companies are integrating a voice assistant into their products or services:
- The Mercedes-Benz MBUX infotainment system provides voice control over windows, in-car temperature, lighting, navigation, phone calls, text messaging, as well as some internet searches.
- Starbucks has partnered with Alibaba in China for food delivery.
- Bank of America’s voice assistant provides a voice interface for their mobile app.
- With Pandora Voice Mode, music streaming users can play, pause, or skip any song, find podcasts, control the volume, and much more.
- The Nike Adapt Huarache White Black sneaker allows for a customized fit through the use of a smartphone app.
- MSC Cruises offers a digital cabin assistant using a smart speaker.
But these are still consumer-focused apps. What about at your office?
Office Applications
Microsoft has developed a range of voice-based services:
- Voice Access is available with Windows 11. For example, a user can open and switch between apps, browse the web, and read and author email. Windows 10 had Voice Command.
- Microsoft Dictate is a speech recognition tool that allows voice input into a Microsoft Office program as well as other programs.
- Microsoft Transcribe records, then converts speech to a text transcript with each speaker individually separated, using Word for the Web.
- Microsoft has recently partnered to bring OpenAI’s Chat-GPT 4 technology to its software products.
Google Docs also supports dictation.
Just Think
We’re not yet at the Star Trek level of voice interface but the race is now on for conversational voice interfaces that will make us smile.
Just think about this workday:
- “reschedule my meeting with Susan to tomorrow”
- Read and process your email: “Delete”, “forward to Susan with the comment Can we do this?’, “Block sender”, “Reply I’m busy this week but Tuesday next week would work for me”…
- Open the quarterly report that you’re working on and ask “How did these stats compare to previous years?”, “Include last year’s stats ”.
Work is going to become a lot more fun!
If you’d like to explore these ideas further or comment on this article, reach me at roban.
This article was published in the
May 2023
edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:10 Issue:4
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