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31 Dec /Amazon Skill Vs. Google Action: Which Voice App is Best for Your Company?

Posted by Tim Hasse

Are you considering building a voice app for your customers in 2019? To put Voice in perspective, the first three years of Amazon Echo and Google Home sales have outpaced Apple iPhone sales in their first three years. The next wave of consumer connection is by speaking to a virtual assistant named Alexa or Google.  So what makes the two different? Here are some important factors to consider:

 

Adoption:

Currently, 1 in 4 homes in the United States already have a smart speaker….as of this writing, there have been 50 million devices sold, and climbing rapidly. Businesses are racing to connect to this new consumer  engagement model by developing applications for their brand. There are currently 50,000 Voice Apps available to consumers today. Another important factor to note, especially for brands considering a Voice App, is that international language support for Google is currently at 30 languages, where Amazon’s Alexa currently supports only 6 languages.

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Market Share:

Amazon Alexa enabled devices are estimated to represent roughly 62% of the voice market. Google Assistant is at 27% of the voice market. Clearly, the current landscape is heavily saturated with Alexa powered devices, but this is largely due to first mover status. Google’s ability for a user to trigger the same voice command on their mobile device as well as their Smart Speaker could end up being a winning strategy for brands.

Voice App Development:

According to a post on Makewebvideo.com – your voice app can integrate seamlessly to your company’s existing technology–whether it’s a mobile app or web platform. For example, asking Alexa to “place an order” on your voice app can post directly to your existing e-commerce platform, keeping all inventory in sync. This integration might be the biggest part of the development scope when considering a voice app.

If you are connecting your voice app to an existing application, the overall speed to develop increases with Google. This is driven by Google’s decision to let developers like T R I M define multiple webhooks while the Alexa platform sends all requests to a single webhook. The Google SDK also works on external web servers, where Alexa’s platform would require creation of additional response objects instead of using the SDK. These are the two main factors associated with speed and cost to develop.

Conversely, simple Alexa Skills that do not need to connect to other applications can be built faster on the Amazon platform. Amazon has provided a turn key environment in AWS Lambda, and it’s clear that this was a decision to get the first wave of developers to build apps quickly.

Lastly, Google Actions go well beyond the smart speaker. When you build a voice app with the Google SDK, your voice app will be available to over 500 million devices that run on Android. This is a compelling consideration as it relates to how you define your touchpoint with your customers.

 

Building Voice Apps with T R I M

T R I M supports you throughout the development process, from Design, to Build, to Testing and Publishing. Our team has consulted small businesses to multi-billion dollar organizations, and we can even work directly with your existing technology team…on-site or from our studio.

Custom Conversations. Our product design team understands the potent nuance of conversational user interfaces (VUI / VUX)—we’ll help design the right conversation with your user that is both on brand and frictionless.

Don’t sweat the approval process. We’re comfortable with the submission and approval process for both Google and Amazon, and that is an integral part of working with us.

Seamless. We can integrate into your existing application–whether that is by working alongside your team, or taking the lead. Our experienced team is entirely in house; We do not contract out any work, and we do not work with offshore or nearshore developers.

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Is your company ready for a Voice App? Let’s Talk:

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