News summary and highlights of the latest developments in the voice ecosystem for November 2019.
What Consumers Want in Voice App Design
Pulse Labs joined forces with VoicebotAI, Voices.com, and Skilled Creative to produce a study around voice user experience (VUX) design by attributing data to design choices. Powered by a 240 person panel, we looked into consumer sentiment around a number of factors ranging from preferences for human versus synthetic voices to tolerance for the duration of voice assistant dialogue. Download Report
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Voice-First Future is Now
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner film is set in the future: November 2019. This means that the future of Blade Runner just came and went. We go over the film's voice-first predictions hits and misses.Read more on our blog
Are you planning to launch a new Alexa Skill or Google Action? Talk to us now about test scheduling to make sure your voice app is ready to delight from the first invocation. Contact sales@pulselabs.ai to request a demo or schedule a testing engagement.
Voice-First Must Reads
Helping more people with wearables: Google to acquire Fitbit
Earlier this month Google announced that they had entered into an agreement to purchase Fitbit. Fitbit is one of the leading fitness tracker and wearables developers, this acquisition shows just how serious Google is about entering into the wearable race. According to various news reports, the deal values the wearable maker at approximately $2.1 billion. Read more on Google's Blog
Amazon smart speaker shipment crossed 10M mark in Q3 2019
A new report by Canalys reveals 28.6M units sold in the global smart speaker market in Q3 2019, up 44.95 over Q3 2018. Amazon led the pack with 10.4M units sold, giving it 36.6% market share. The smart display category grew a whopping 500%, selling 6.3M units. The modestly priced Echo Show 5 was key for this surge, making up 16% of Amazon's global shipments in Q3 2019. Read more on Canalys Newsroom
Spotify Free Users: You Can Now Stream Music on Alexa, Sonos, and Bose Speakers Spotify has announced that their free tier streaming now works with Alexa, Sonos, and Bose smart speakers. Previously, Alexa integration had only been available for paid subscribers of the premium tier. This move significantly expands Spotify's potential audience base as it continues to grow its service in a tight audio streaming market. Read more on Spotify Newsroom
Voice-first on the road: Amazon Music recently announced their release of Beck's Album: Paisley Park Sessions, an Amazon Original. Much to our delight, they set out billboards targeting Echo Auto adopters for in-car activation.
Save the Date December 4, 8 AM PST: Join MariadelMar Gonzalez (our Head of Marketing), German Viscuso (Alexa Evangelist EU) and Carlos Ordonez (Alexa Evangelist Mexico) Live from re:Invent 2019 via Twitch for a discussion on Alexa multilingual mode.
December 4, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM PST: Dylan Zwick, our CPO, will be presenting "Improving customer retention for your Alexa skill" at re:Invent 2019 at Aria, Level 3 West, Starvine 4, Las Vegas, NV.
December 5, 10:40 AM PST: Dylan will be joining the Amazon Alexa team live from re:Invent on Twitch talking about his presentation.
December 10, 5:30 - 8:30 PM, Seattle: End of Year Celebration! WiV Seattle, Seattle Alexa Meetup, and Chatbot & Voice Meetup. Sign up for tickets.
