ecommerce Archives | Tenser'sTirades

THE RISE OF VOICE COMPUTING opens a range of innovations for consumer commerce. It not only impacts how consumers interact with digital retailers and services, but also how business decisions are made.

In this debut edition of HyTalk, we meet Jon Stine, founder of the Open Voice Network. OVN is spearheading the effort to define both technical standards and ethical use guidelines for voice assistance technologies.

Jon shares his fascinating outlook for the future impact of voice computing. We discuss its effect on every-day consumer experiences and AI-empowered commercial applications. He describes some fundamental principles and “blue sky” scenarios.

Voice Computing in the Enterprise

Most of us are growing more familiar using with smart voice devices like Alexa, Siri, and Hey Google for simple tasks. Interactions with voice assistants in the business environment are more novel, however.

FOR GRAYING BABY BOOMERS like me, the awesome power of demographics has in many ways defined our lives. There are a lot of us. We clogged our kindergartens, our universities, our workplaces, our media, our politics and our communities with sheer numerical might; and the retail marketing universe seemed to revolve around our needs and our sense of entitlement.

In his 1980 book, Great Expectations, author Landon Y. Jones called this phenomenon “a pig in a python” – a rather visceral visualization of how the boomers’ demographic bulge has traveled through America’s culture, distorting as it goes.

Along the way we also had a lot of kids. So many, in fact that we engendered an echo boom that is numerically larger than our own. In case you haven’t noticed, those 75 million “millennials,” as the demographers like to call them, now largely dominate cultural, political and marketing discourse. Not to mention our consumer economy – the 18-34 cohort wields $2 trillion in purchasing power.