For a company to create brand loyalty, it is important to listen to what customers have to say and resolve their queries as quickly and efficiently as possible. That is why most large companies have a contact or call center, or outsource these tasks to one. When people call the customer support number, they are greeted by a human-like voice that gives them directions, asking them to press certain numbers on the dial pad depending on the purpose of calling.

Hence, with the growing number of contact centers around the world, P&S Intelligence forecasts the voice assistant market value to increase from $1,723.6 million in 2019 to $26,872.6 million by 2030, at a CAGR of 29.7% between 2020 and 2030. This is because such a human-like voice is generated at contact centers by sophisticated voice assistant software. Moreover, the even-more-advanced voice assistant software can talk like a human, rather than just offering directions, reacting to what someone at the other end of the phone is saying.

They use a variety of technologies to understand human speech and then converse accordingly, such as speech recognition, voice recognition, text-to-speech recognition, and natural language processing (NLP). These technologies help the assistant or chatbot understand the tone, to identify the mood and feeling of the customer, so an appropriate response can be given or the call can be transferred to an actual human employee at the contact center. Even many websites now employ a chatbot (message box) powered by a voice assistant, rather than a human, at least during the initial stages of the conversation.

Currently, led by the BFSI sector, North America is the largest voice assistant market, and it will continue being so till 2030. Moreover, the region is home to some of the largest IT companies, which results in an easy availability of these solutions. Additionally, any new technology is adopted first in this continent and then elsewhere. Thus, with advancements in artificial intelligence and its associated technologies, such as NLP, ML, and speech recognition, North American companies have gained access to better voice assistant solutions.

In the coming years, the usage of these solutions will rise the fastest in Asia-Pacific (APAC). This will be because India, China, and many other regional countries are popular outsourcing destinations for companies based in North America and Europe, therefore have a large number of contact centers. With the increasing workload, such places are using voice assistants so that the human employees can be freed from repetitive and routine tasks and engaged in more-important ones.

Thus, with businesses around the world making efforts to engage with customers, while reducing the workload on human employees, they will turn even more to voice assistants.