Today we are exploring some of the trending skills in Amazon Alexa and popular Google Actions.

We asked Alexa ” what are your trending skills?” and this is are the eight first answers.

1. Question of the day.
2. Peaceful meditation.
3. Eighties letters.
4. True or false
5. Jurassic bark
6. Clean joke of the day
7. Inspire me
8. Find my phone

Then we ask Google Home its popular actions:

1. I’m home routine. Turn your lights on, give home reminders and play music.
2. Pandora
3. Google Play music
4. Restaurant recommendations
5. Opens apps and websites
6. TuneIn. Audio app with more than 100 000 radio stations.
7. Reminders
8. Google Maps

Trending Alexa skills shows an user interaction more entertainment based than Google home, more utility based. Besides the pervasive use of playing music no major brand is in the first eight or 10 skills or actions. It seems like a preeminent trend the use of smart speakers for playing sounds, music, games and utilities like reminders, home automation and search.

Sources:

https://www.amazon.com/alexa-skills/b/ref=skillsrw_surl?ie=UTF8&node=13727921011

https://assistant.google.com/explore/g/9?hl=en

There is no doubt of the convenience of voice for a lot of everyday tasks. And banking and finance institutions are quickly adopting voice technologies. Saying Alexa send 500 from my checking account to John Doe is faster and easier than to log in into your banking app, look for transfers, confirm amount and transfer the money. Granted, there are security concerns and you probably won’t like other people present in the house to hear your balance of zero, but there’s no doubt of the convenience of using voice for everyday money management. This are the companies that are already taking a leap into voice in banking and finance:

Bank of America: Erica, an AI-powered, voice-activated virtual financial assistant. Erica lives in the bank’s mobile app and just recently surpassed one million users, according to a press release on BusinessWire.

Intuit: At the end of 2017, Intuit released the QuickBooks Assistant, an AI-driven voice interface to help self-employed users glean insights from their financial data. Now, thanks to their latest virtual assistant, users can open the Quickbooks Self-Employed mobile app and ask questions like, “how are my numbers this month?”

Conversation.one the company we already talked about last week that allows you to create conversational  reached an agreement with Fintech giant Finastra to integrate their platforms. This allows Conversation.one to extend their voice solution to Finastra’s 9,000+ financial institutions. It also means a lot more banks and credit unions will be able to offer omni-channel customer experiences without having to drop a single line of code.

This companies are leading the way in VoiceFirst finance and banking applications but are only scratching the surface on what it’s possible and we’ll see in a few years.

Source: https://www.voicesummit.ai/blog/voice-interfaces-are-making-banking-and-finances-infinitely-less-frustrating

Alexa, play when in Rome. Company Sensible Object announced on Monday it has raised $3.2 million to grow its experiences that combine Alexa with board games. “The company’s first game, When in Rome, will go on sale July 2 on Amazon in Australia, Canada, the US, and UK.”

When in Rome is a multiplayer game that uses Alexa as your guide and provider of a multimedia experience. The game introduces players to locals in cities around the world through trivia questions and was created with the help of a team of creatives that includes writers, composers, and theater directors who managed the dialogue of local voice actors. The experience, which visits 20 cities, can be tried for free by speaking with the When in Rome Alexa skill in the US.

Instead of the typical board game that remains an unaltered, static experience, Sensible Object is using Alexa as a way to provide an interactive experience, one that keeps people coming back through consistent updates and improvements.

Investors in the $3.2 million round include London Venture Partners, NCSOFT, March Capital, and Alexa Fund — a $200 million initiative by Amazon to support promising startups that are growing the ecosystem of products and services that work with virtual assistants.

Will this open a new frontier for interactive games using voice technologies? Games are an instrumental element in voice tech adoption and this investment shines in the type of experiences that investors are looking for.

Find the full article at voicefirstweekly.com/flashbriefing

Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/06/18/sensible-object-raises-3-2-million-for-board-games-you-play-with-alexa-and-google-assistant/

Google has stated that voice search accounts for 20% of its mobile queries. For context, half of all search queries originated on mobile devices. This frequency of voice search use shows how relevant this technology is to brick-and-mortar locations, altho it’s worth noting that elsewhere in the cited research it’s clear that consumers are using voice search to get information on businesses of which they’re already aware, rather than discovering new ones. For now. We still have to see how advertising and promotion will work in voice assistants, however it’s a good strategy to start on voice search today and evolve as the platform grows. Remember that it’s more important to be the first that it’s to be the best.

https://www.modev.com/blog/google-advises-businesses-to-optimize-content-for-voice-search