Friday Insights: Voice-activated digital assistants

27 April 2017

In a world where visual stimulation is prevalent, we wanted to explore other aspects of communication, in particular voice-activated digital assistants and how they are carving a place for themselves in today’s marketplace.

Siri was the first foray into voice-activated digital assistants, but it got off to a rocky start when the internet exploded with memes about the weird and wonderful answers it was giving to seemingly simple questions. Since its launch, Apple has continued to invest in the technology, with competitors such as Microsoft also developing their own version.

As tech companies give the impression that this technology is the way of the future and therefore worthy of investment, we wanted to understand how the use of voice activation has grown since its initial release and the types of tasks voice-activated digital assistants are currently being used for.