 Time now for our technology leaders panel. They will discuss how voice technology and voice-enabled solutions have evolved in light of increasing numbers and usage of smartphones, expansion of existing applications, acceleration of voice adoption in AI-powered applications and increase in new voice applications. The panelists are Anil Nayar, CEO, VMLYNR, Dilip RS, Country Manager, Alexa Skills, Voice Service and Mobile, Amazon, Jayesh Ulathil, General Manager, India and Mobi, Kumar Rangarajan, Co-Founder and Obsessive Director at Slang Labs. Neha Varjathya, Marketing Head, Platforms and Devices, Google India, Shankar Jayaraman, SVP Products, Geo Platforms and the host for the session is Tushar Vyas, President Group M South Asia. So I'll hand it over to Tushar for this amazing session for you all. Thanks. Thank you, thanks for having me. And hello everyone and hope you are keeping well. I'd also like to thank our audience and my co-founders. I think we have pretty interesting 90 odd minutes where various facets of sort of voice that can sort of cover red beat in form of interactive bot or assistant or getting embedded into various devices. It can be also like a utility kind of environment or it can go up to convenient kind of environment. So the spectrum of utility we have seen in the last 90 odd minutes. And voice is basically powered by strong underlying technology like AI, ML or national language processing, right? So in this panel basically we are going to focus more on the intersection of product voice and marketing. So that's a area we are going to cover. If you look at broadly basically, and this is something which we covered in the report also, we are going into two direction. One ecosystem which is getting developed around the entire connected ecosystem and more with the smartphone, smart speaker and around those areas. While there is a similarly very interesting ecosystem which is getting developed around feature phone and building a utility which is more into a rural kind of environment and bringing very, very interesting sort of live support to professional support to sort of something which is very sort of utilitarian kind of activities of when one can do around that, right? So it's a very interesting spectrum of work which is happening in a voice environment. And today we are lucky to have a sort of panel which is representing basically all facet of this ecosystem. So we have got a representation from telecom. We have got a platform. We have got a Nebula ecosystem which is powering this entire environment, right? So really glad to see the full ecosystem being represented here. So let me straight away jump in in interest of time and let me start with Shankar and Shankar represent the geo platform with the product and geo platform. Shankar would like to understand basically where does voice fit into sort of products take at a geo platform? And what are the merits? How do you see a voice playing a role in your ecosystem? Hi Dushar, first of all, thank you for giving me this opportunity to participate in this conference. At geo we strongly believe voice is an important medium for customer engagement. We have been integrating voice AI based technologies across multiple products of ours. We are homegrown voice assistant on our private home sit-up box service where voice assistant plays a crucial role in certain role in being searching for content, interactivity, et cetera on the TV. Then there's our assistant on our feature forms. Then there is voice search within GeoMod and also the first of its kind interactive video board service that's available on my geo that enables our customers to interact with brands as well as celebrities for a video call. Voice will continue to play a key role for interactivity in all our upcoming apps and device variants as well, which you will see in the coming days. And of course if you look as a telco, we believe voice communication and automation using voice for customer case is a critical component that we have invested in and will continue to invest in the future as well. All our services are built, especially all the voice interaction are built with ML algorithm that ensure a great level of accuracy across different languages because understanding not just the speech, but also the intent and the sentiment is very key to ensure the conversations flow in the right direction. So our focus has not just been on the market, the market is used to assist to that I've been seeing earlier, that used to voice assistants and smart speakers, voice and mobile device as well as the smart speakers. But it's the rural and the semi-arbon market and also the senior citizens and elderly people in the urban market that is an important base where we see is important to make sure that we level up on the accuracy front and make sure that our services are available in multiple languages. Today, we have our voice services voice AI available in 10 plus languages and we are looking to increase this too many more as we go forward. And so I mean I covered some of the product, some of the products where we have integrated voice. We've also been doing pilots, we are in our geo games application. We have games, we have done pilots with games where there's interactivity using voice where you have to respond using voice to level up in that particular game. We have enabled voice search as a key feature across our browser, across our geo cinema, geo TV and other applications as well. So yes, voice has been playing an important role but and I see that it will continue to play a critical role in all our product search. Is there any sort of key point on a sort of user preference or any insight which you've gathered in our sort of last few months? Is there anything you'd like to talk about? I can talk about at least one example. So in our, when I spoke about the voice assistant that's firing our set of box, right? And what we see is that the application is being used particularly by 75, 80% of our user base. And this is not just for, and a lot of them are power users. And this is not just for searching for content. I mean, I mean, on a set of box, primarily it's for content consumption or at best you will probably be getting, right? But you're not just looking for content but also seasonal queries that we see. And these seasonal queries include like looking for a cricket score for weather update, et cetera, et cetera. Now, we have additionally built algorithms that recognize customer profile through voice tonality. Overlay that with additional demographic parameters and which help us generate interesting insights. And these interesting insights include adoption of Indian languages. While we started with English over the last few months, we have been adding more and more languages and we're close to 10 languages now that are currently live. So one of the insights we see is the semi urban population as well as the senior citizens prefer to communicate using the native tongue, essentially. So in fact, today, close to 20% of our usage is in the Tamil or Telugu, which is a direction for our product as well to make sure that we continuously improve accuracy and the sentiment analysis and how best we can then enable the conversation. In fact, I can go to the next one. We do get, while the language is set to Hindi, we do get queries in Bojpuri, for example. While we don't support Bojpuri today, but that's an interesting insight for us to see what the market demands and how we can tune our product offering accordingly. And there's also this other interactive voice bot that's available as part of my view. While a lot of interest is related to celebrity bots, we also built this bot for health check called MyDoctorNee. There, it is currently available on the smartphone, but we're also looking at extending it to our feature phone user base as well. So yes, we see good amount of usage at all our touch points and we will continue to invest in this and be the best possible experience wherever we have voice playing in. Thanks, Shankar, for the insight. So let me go to Neha and Neha, you guys have a sort of bird's eye view of maybe a large part of Indian internet ecosystem, right? So what are the key voice trends, voice-related trends you are seeing across your ecosystem and the broader market level? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me, Tushar. I think it's a very exciting conversation to be a part of for sure. We definitely see that it's a rapidly evolving phenomenon, which is voice and technology, and it will actually fundamentally change the way people interact with technology as we move forward. In fact, we believe that India will actually leapfrog when it comes to voice and skip typing and move to voice as interacting with technology, similar to what we sort of saw with mobile usage when we became a mobile-first internet user market. So just to give you some perspective, when we launched Google Assistant less than four years back in 2016-17, and since then, actually, we've seen unprecedented growth in India for voice and for our system. Now, India is one of the biggest markets for voice and Google Assistant globally. And Hindi is actually the second biggest language for the assistant after English. So that is the kind of adoption we're seeing for voice as a medium here. And it's not actually just on digital assistant, but we're seeing similar trends happen on Google Search. We're seeing similar trends happen on YouTube. For instance, we are seeing almost like a 3x year-on-year growth for search queries, voice queries on Search in India. So people are using voice to sort of interact with technology across our platforms, even on YouTube, which is a trend actually very unique to India. So definitely India will sort of leapfrog for sure. Why is this happening? I think a couple of points, Sarah has covered it. Shankar sort of referred to it, but actually there is a very inherent need to adopt voice. It's very simple. It's one of those technologies where there's no user manual needed. And we're actually seeing it's not about early adopters. This is one of those technologies which is defying the early adopter phenomenon because it is the new internet users. It is the senior or more senior users like Shankar spoke about who are actually taking very well to voice. The second thing we're seeing is I mean, being a mobile first country, we do see about 60% users use voice on their smartphones. It is ubiquitous. You can go across, you can have actions on voice. And in terms of use cases, we're also seeing varied use cases. It can be something as simple as basic information around whether news to complex queries around recipes. Entertainment is very big. So right from like play my favorite song or show me my favorite video. And also what's happening is it's almost becoming like a conversation, right? Like we're seeing a lot of fun stuff happen. Like tell me a joke, but also we've seen queries like, will you marry me? People actually asking that to the Google Assistant and Google is actually received more than 4.5 lakh marriage proposals in India. So it's really become like a fun medium of interaction. It's becoming more conversational. And it's very easy to use which is driving this technology. And lastly, I'd say it's really the Indic languages. I think the fact that currently, if you look at our internet user base, 72% of the internet users prefer a language other than English. And if you just look at English and Indic languages, English has about 26 letters, right? And if I compare that to Hindi, which has about more than 50 letters, then you have to add Matras. It's a fairly complex task to sort of key that in on a keyboard, right? But if you were to type, if you were to speak it out, it's actually three times faster to speak than to type. So it's intrinsically coming to people. And in fact, for our Hindi queries, we saw a 400% year on your growth on search. So really, Indic is driving voice adoption as well in the country. I mean, to give you an instance last year, in 2019, actually not last year, but we saw about 100 million cricket queries in Hindi which was received by the Assistant. So people are really taking this on. And in fact, as we move forward from here, and more Indians are getting online, we will have the Geophone Next coming up. Shankar is here. We'll have the Geophone Next coming up which will also offer a very voice-first experience in multiple languages for the users. We know that 90%, if not more, of the new internet users will prefer an Indic language. The voice adoption will grow very, very phenomenally as we move forward. So very exciting times. I think we have, while you're seeing growth, but there is much more to come as we move forward. Yeah, you made an interesting point. Just wanted to check if you have a sort of more insight on is there any difference between the Indic language user and the English language user? So is there a, are you seeing any pattern or any interesting insight there? Are they? We are definitely seeing the adoption more with Indic language users. I think it's the ease and simplicity of usage. For the early internet users, the way they will start interacting with the smartphone will primarily be through voice, all the in-app actions of being able to play a song, book, that's going to front it. And I think from a more evolved internet user standpoint, of course it's going to be those connected devices. So the smart home category, smart speakers, speaking to the TV. So we are going to see voice emerge in multiple forms, but I think the distinction we're seeing is for the new internet users, it's going to be the interaction with the smartphone. For the evolved internet users, we will see a more sort of connected devices usage happening as we move forward. Thank you, pretty interesting that. And let me go to Deepak. Deepak, I think Sarah has done up the job for you in terms of the example she was talking about was Alexa. But what I found fascinating was the spectrum of integration and the sort of great view for it. So if you can just talk about that basically, what's the kind of use case you are looking at and what kind of integration you are looking at driving and if there is anything specific to India, you would like to highlight here. Yeah, sure. Thanks Tushar for the opportunity. I think if you start with our vision, right? I think like Sarah alluded to, so did Neha. It's about how do we make voice ubiquitous and available for customers to be accessed everywhere, right? It's only in one corner of your house, it will not take off as a technology, right? It needs to be accessible everywhere. So in lieu of that, we are trying to see how can we increase the footprint of any voice assistant in our case, Alexa. So we started with just two brands in India, like two smart speaker brands, which are non-echo brands, non-Amazon brands. Now we have 100 plus brands in India alone who have voice integrated in the device, right? And these are across categories. Today you could access voice or Alexa on a smart speaker, like a board speaker or a Zebronic speaker. Headphones now come with voice integrated. Just two weeks ago, we had two smartwatches launched by Boat and Xiaomi, which had Alexa integrated. Neha talked about TV, so did Shankar. So we have Samsung, LG, those kinds of brands on TV, setup boxes, laptops, automobiles just picked up a big way in the US where we have General Motors signed up with a voice assistant. Like my personal favorite, which I've been begging my team for a test device is a Lamborghini Huracan. So they had Alexa integrated car, which is like become very popular. And I remember going back, talking about quirky such devices, I remember going back to CES a couple of years back. They even had toothbrushes and commode which are integrated with Alexa, right? So that is like the extents of voice assistants. And no matter where you go, we have a mobile phone, you have your speaker, you have your earphone, you should be able to access your voice assistant very easily. I think that's the vision we have. The second part is these are all still devices which have Alexa integrated in it, right? We also wanna make sure there are other devices who are compatible with voice assistants. So I think Neha talked about smart home becoming a big thing. And we have seen that in India, like two, three years back when we were launching a smart bulb would cost 2,500 rupees in India. Like obviously the barrier to entry is very high, right? Now it's as low as 500 rupees. And I believe that entire smart home evolution has happened because of the technology of voice, right? Customers can easily sit in one corner of the house and control their TV, AC, any plug point, air purifier, setup boxes all through voice, right? And hence we are seeing all of these categories take off in a big way. In our case alone, only with Alexa, we're seeing about 8.6 lakh interactions per day with smart devices, right? So that's the kind of volume we are seeing. And if I look at where else can customers access voice? Sarah talked about the Whole Foods example where you can put in like a retail experience where you can put in your earbuds and walk through the store. We launched Alexa integration on the Amazon shopping app itself, right? We have millions of customers every day coming to Amazon shopping app. And through that alone, today we have five lakh plus customers asking something or the other on Amazon shopping app for better deals, for where is their order, for making payments of their mobile bills, whatever it be, lakhs of customers are every day asking why our voice alone on Amazon shopping app? That's how prevalent it's become today. Very interesting. And how many proposal Alexa is getting? Marriage proposal Alexa? Yeah, actually the same thing it is. I don't think people are like favoring Alexa or Google, one way or the other. They just propose either of the two or like, I love you, I wanna marry you are one of the most common entrances. I resonate there with Neha. And what kind of skills are popular? Is there like a specific brand you are seeing in India? John Ray or any unique skills which are getting popular? Yeah, so when we started off, we wanted to not just work with big brand but also look at indie developers and build like an entire like voice skills or app ecosystem of sorts. So we have like almost 100,000 plus developers start building skills for Alexa in India, about 30,000 skills which are already published for the Indian customers. The popular ones are like, if you see the obvious ones, right? Which are very heavy in content play. You can talk about music, but devotion is very popular in India. We saw it as a trend compared to all other locals. In India, people asking for Hanuman Chalisa, Sai Darshan, video audio of it is very popular in India. Kids absolutely love interacting voice assistant. Somebody talked about it earlier as well, where people wanna, our kids are gonna ask for rhymes, animal sounds, like whatever they can talk to, they've got a companion there. Our recipes has become very popular. We have like Sanjeev Kapoor recipes and the likes. So customers trying to use Alexa in their homes to say, how can I find out new innovative ways to cook? News obviously which lends itself very well. But it's not just about these big brands, right? There are a lot of indie, smaller developers who have built very cool, like a 20 questions game or like a game with animal sounds or like a simple, like a sleep sound, right? Help me sleep. And you can get a nice relaxing ocean music to play, right? And it, because it is so convenient, I don't have to like tap, tap, tap three clicks and go to an audio service to listen to music. I can just do it through voice. That's what makes this very popular. Thanks, thanks. So pretty interesting, Dilip. And this is the ecosystem which is now at a scale. There's a sort of good amount of consumer engagement which is happening. And this is, I think these are the sort of indicator which is right for Brand to be there. So Anil, what's your view in terms of how to give a brand a voice in this environment and how Brand can sort of start leveraging it? Yes. Hello, everybody. And it's fantastic listening to Sarah and all of my fellow panelists. What is fascinating is, I think we are on the cusp of something huge. And till now you interacted through word or through type and after that through video. And all of us felt that that was the biggest thing till voice came on the scene. And the sheer speed at which voice is kind of growing is mind boggling in that sense. The interesting thing here is, if you look at it from a Brand's perspective, Brands have always struggled to have a deep, meaningful relationship with consumers and voice actually allows you that. Because like Sarah said, there is an element of feeling and voice which is not there in video, which is not there in the written word or the red word in that sense. It also brings it as close to one-on-one human interaction as possible. So your brand can literally take a human form when interacting with the consumer. The other interesting thing is, technology exists for convenience. And we all eventually want to take it to the ultimate level of convenience. And therefore, an interesting thing about voice is the entire multitasking aspect of it, the entire hands-free aspect of it. And last but not the least, it's about curation because this is a one-on-one kind of a medium. And what is interesting here is there is a degree of personalization where Brands can actually talk to Tushar as differently as talking to Anil and give them a highly personalized experience. So if you ask me, one is a high degree of feeling and empathy and second is a high degree of personalization and the third is convenience. And all these three put together is like a winning thing for any brand. And I would strongly exhort all Brands to explore this medium as fast as possible if they want to win in the marketplace. Yeah, if you talk to many of sort of oldies and they will talk about the concept of a sonic brand in audio, right? And this goes back all the way to like a radio desk and many still remember that Titans sonic tune like tink, tink, tink. So basically it's wherever you are that sort of brings that brand memories back, bring the brand connection back, right? So how do you see this evolving in this space, Anil? Is it sonic brands are going to elevate it to next level? What are the dimensions? You know, Tushar, when we interact with anything, we look at the five senses and in marketing and branding, the sense of audio has been subdued till now and which is where now with all these devices and this technology popping up, marketers will have to look at this very, very seriously. The interesting thing is this is one of the most emotive of the senses in that sense. And therefore imagine marketing has been happening with one sense shut in that sense. And now the sense will have to open up and which basically means like how you have Alexa skills, marketers will need to kind of develop voice skills as part of their evolution. And one big part of it is, you know, you have a toothpaste, for example, you know how the toothpastes taste like, you know, you can touch the toothpaste, you can see the toothpaste, but you now need to start hearing the toothpaste as well. And as much as you, you know, as this is alien to people, but then one will need to kind of, a very classic example is Britannia. You know, when they did that entire Italian thing better, you know, the sound of that little Britannia, the spoon kind of touching the mug is firmly imprinted and for me, this is hugely subliminal and it works at multiple deep levels and this is something that we've all grown upon. And sound has, I think, one of the greatest imprints, you know, more than sight, you may forget things, but you will never forget like a great song or a great tune that is kind of embedded in your head. So yes, brands will have to look at the sonic branding side of their brand. It's not to say that every brand needs it, every category needs it, but brands and categories that need it will need to kind of delve into this much faster. Interesting. Moving on to Jayesh, how do you see basically voice advertising proposition? Is it, do you see more like advertising or do you see more like a solutioning or a nebler ecosystem? Thanks, thanks a lot for getting me in the panel. A lot of good amount of, you know, information has already blown the panel. I resonate a lot with what Anil was saying. So voice is something which is very, very personalized. It is something which gives you that experience which probably the other senses don't give. And one of the reasons and an anecdotal example that I would like to take is a drink that we have, we always say cheers. And the story goes that, there are two stories to it, but I'll narrate the story which is more relevant over here, which is basically that you can sense it, you can smell it, you can taste it, but you can't hear this drink and you say cheers to acknowledge that. Anyways, leaving that aside, the one key thing that we all, I mean, I'm sure some of the earlier panels and some of the speakers would have touched upon it, audio versus video as a senses, the amount of signals that are being sent by one of our senses, which is the I, is about 100 times more than the amount of signals that the audio sense sense. So what it effectively means is that there is a lot of information which is passed. And if you look at it, if you can really look at what you are seeing right now, I'm talking to everybody here, you probably have a thousand images that you are seeing right now, but just one voice that you're hearing and that's mine. And that is exactly the power of audio in terms of advertising. So while in case of video or for that matter of print, the amount of clutter that you have to cut through to put across a communication messaging to your consumer is much higher, whereas in the case of audio, at max you can hear two sounds or rather you can comprehend two different conversations going on at max, that's it, not more than that. So it gives you a clutter-free environment. So cutting the clutter becomes a very important piece that audio advertising does for you. The second one is we all alluded to the different connected devices and how you are interacting with it. So that's something called the psychology of power. What's the psychology of power? Essentially, I think humans have this thing and then that you have power over somebody when you're able to order something out. Like for example, you are ordering Alexa to show me something or through our music. It's that psychology of power. So that interaction has some amount of satisfaction that is given to the human mind. That is something which we need to keep in mind. The last one, of course, is the interactivity and the personalization that multiple people write from Anil and I think Neha and Sara in our previous talk also was talking about the personalized experience that is there. That is very important. Now, having said that, you have multiple touch points and you still don't need to forget or we shouldn't forget the fact that one of the most reached mediums or rather the most, the medium which has the most reach in India is still audio. AR covers close to about 99% of the Indian population. No other medium, no other medium can cover that, even imagine to cover that right now. Maybe, you know, smartphones will reach there, physical phones will reach there, but not yet. So one is the regular content that has been consumed and the propensity to, you know, throw in a messaging through that content. The second one is to actually look at audio video experience and how can you, you know, tweak the audio experience in that particular interaction to give the importance that it requires and make sure that the interactivity is much more. And then of course, you know, these two things there will be several other touch points that you will have. Now, coming to answer your point specifically Tushar, if you look at audio, it can both be a standalone medium for communication, which is in the case of any content and being advertising as a pre-roller for post-roll in a podcast or an audio stream or whatever. Or it could be a very interactive and enhancing medium, which can be a solution-led medium. So both are possible and it is for the brand to understand and utilize it for the need that they require, the solution that they are the problem that they are solving for. So that's how I would look at it. One major advantage that I would like to point out or actually three is basically the fact that audio, unlike in the case of video or normal display ads, I'm talking from an advertising point of view, the brand safety is very high. You are not compromising on the brand. So there is no fake calls, sorry, not fake calls of wrong clicks or there's no accidental clicks. Whatever interaction is happening is an intentional interaction. And then of course, you can't have an ad blocking because it is something which is on request. So considering all this, audio definitely is something which needs to be looked at very, very closely from an advertiser's point of view. Yes, how do you use it is something more very important for the brand to figure out and use it in the right sense. Thanks, Zeyesh. On this note, let me go to Kumar and asking about in terms of how voice can integrate and improve the consumer's journey. So again, sort of Kumar and his organization focusing a lot on those aspects. Kumar, over to you and some insight on those areas. Hey, thanks, Zeyesh. Thanks, Zeyesh. Glad to be here and thanks for being here. To set up some context about us, we are a voice assistant as a service company that allows brands to easily integrate our multilingual voice assistant inside their mobile and web apps. So that's what we fundamentally do. So when you talk about voice integration inside apps, especially when it is being multilingual, it is useful for three main categories of people. Neha already mentioned, even seniors were struggling to catch up with technology changes, but they're forced to now use apps. A lot of things are being done through apps now. They have sort of learned how to do this apps. They're tied to tie three folks who are using technology for the first time. So they've learned, but a lot of people are actually still missing out there. A lot of things are very unfamiliar with them. And power users like you and me, even but we are feeling limited by the existence of the interfaces that exist today. There is a very rigid hierarchy in which you have to do things and that's very limiting. So for our various customers, we have seen different kinds of engagement patterns that actually emerge and data addressing. So one is like the most obvious one, the number of searches they do on apps are actually significantly increased with voice. They're seeing at least 20% increase additional searches that people are able to know. People who use voice versus people who only use touch. And then the number of searches they do seems to have a direct impact on the number of conversions that is actually happening on the apps and how people use it. The kind of products that have been discovered or data that has been provided is also higher. We have at least 15% additional data being provided to other people who use voice as opposed to people who only use voice. Like the richness of data, the deeper information they're able to not provide, again, depends on various domains, but they're able to not provide policies. And interestingly, I think like 25% of users who have used voice seem to like to prefer using voice with you. Because they don't go back to touch. But most of when we provide a voice assistant, it's always, they can use touch also and voice also. And it's always an option. But then people use voice team to stick, prefer to use voice and then don't go back to using touching it. And finally, the pattern that I think that people are loading a lot of repetitive tasks. This is leading to more frequent by it. Because a lot of repeated tasks, if you cut down on the effort, time it takes to do repetitive tasks, especially when you're buying, like in a big basket, you don't have to buy a lot of items. By making the voice enable, it seems to reduce increased frequent purchases. We don't have data on this yet. But anecdotally, my wife, who is it doctor? Now, she refuses to do her shopping on the big basket of until as I am home. Because only on my phone, which is an Android phone, as our voice assistant will say it, it keeps waiting for it. So that's another interesting part of the facing. Now for, yeah, I think that's the high level pattern that we're able to see. So do you see a voice replacing touch on the human and very interesting point? Yeah, so we don't see voice replacing touch. Our whole belief is like voice will coexist with touch, right? Like I think like both have its own benefits, right? Like voice is fast. It does not have any dimensional, it's like zero dimensional. It has no dimensional restrictions, but it is very ephemeral. Information does not persist as it does on a screen. It just comes and goes away. But actually it's restrictive, but the information, but I also used to do things faster and it is right there on the screen. So our whole thing is like if something can be done with like less than, like less than three clicks in two clicks or one or two clicks, it can be done. That is actually much faster. The information is right there on the screen. But anything beyond that, voice starts to become a much better mechanism. We are making a very interesting point. And once you move into those kind of hybrid journey, the way you look at UX and saw the design of website and app, we'll also start fundamentally changing, right? In that new implication on a sort of multiple area, my very interesting point. This let me go back to a sort of gyration, to continue on the advertising piece. I just wanted to see what's a form and what kind of form factor of advertising you've seen this. Is it going to be like a pre-roll, mid-roll kind of thing, which you have seen in video or is there a sort of different ways to reach out consumer in? Yeah, Dushar. So essentially, like I said earlier, the kind of medium or the touch point also defines the kind of format that we can use. We obviously have the plain vanilla, 30-second voice ads or 15-second voice ads or whatever the skip side is. That is something which is definitely there. And that is something which you can use to continuously build a certain brand. But in terms of innovations, the voice offers a lot of innovation, which we probably haven't even tried out. Like for example, recently, we had a movie, we had done something for a brand in the automotive sector. Let's talk about it with Kia. And essentially the features, the Kia features were highlighted on a video screen using a voice assistance. In a sense, the user was prompted to actually start asking for, taking up the sunroof or opening up the sunroof or rolling down the windows or and so forth. So that's just one example. But the whole point I'm trying to make is voice becomes an interaction point. And that interaction point can be driven into a lot of different areas of innovation which can be used to give a customer a unique experience or experience the product as such. There have been, we have had specific cases where we have done whole Pizza Hut ordering process through an ad which was why it's enabled. Like right from the selection of the menu to the final order piece. Yeah, finally translation to the payment part had to be taken up separately. But that is something which we have done in a different country. So the other one, I think you might have also heard about the Flipkart story where Amitabh Bachchan had a new track with a celebrity calling which was done. So there are multiple things that you can do the multiple formats you can utilize apart from the plain vanilla one, which anyways there and exploring this becomes the important piece. And that's how you have a sticky memory to the consumer add a sticky memory to the consumer because as such it's a powerful medium on top of that you bring in that experience as well. I mean, what do you think in terms of building a brand content ecosystem for this idea of audio environment? Do you think the current ecosystem are ready and what are the new enableers required if you have to move fairly quickly and deep into this area? So the current ecosystem honestly is not ready and I think that's a skill that brands and marketers and advertisers on the entire ecosystem needs to kind of invest in because if you were to look at the various interfaces and if you have a holistic voice strategy then you need to look at an IVR you need to look at chatbots you need to look at podcasts. You also need to look at your entire brand content being narrated from a spoken content perspective and all this means investment that also means a shift and change in mindset. And I can see that brands are interested in this they are taking baby steps in the space but I would see a lot more needing to happen if brands have to genuinely own the space that is point number one. The other point interesting point is it is not just about interjecting a small audio clip somewhere or one skill it is about genuinely understanding this medium and figuring out how we can hack this medium and it takes me back to a very interesting Burger King intervention and voice nearly two, three years ago where they placed a voice assistant command in one of their TVCs and their TVCs played during prime time and most people in America have got their voice assistant on unlike India where there are still some privacy concerns and stuff like that and it automatically triggered voice assistants across the US which was basically asking about why is the Burger King burger the best and that went to Wikipedia picked up a lovely example of why Burger King makes the best burgers and it was promptly shut down but the point is that was a very intuitive hustle kind of way of using voice coming from a very organic understanding of how this thing works and like Sara was saying, you know, unlike us and somebody, some of the other panelists said that for us it's still a psychology of command but for a lot of the younger generation coming up it's going to be part of their life it's almost like a companion or a creating and therefore we as advertisers, marketers, ideators, platform creators we need to think and work harder so a lot of work is needed in this space. Interesting and I think one of the other key thing I see is basically, you know, the mindset of campaign versus mindset of platform when you're getting to this kind of environment you need to have a slightly long-term commitment deeper thinking and a sort of better treatment so yeah, so it's valid. Yeah, moving to Shankar and you had Anil and Jayas talk about sort of the ecosystem and you also look after sort of what they are, right? So advertise inside of product as well as the brand sort of product platforms where do you see brand fitting into that so? Sure. Yeah, so while we have a voice AI platform covering some of our apps and devices we also have our app tech GeoAds ecosystem today. So we are integrating both we have integrated both and you know this has enabled us to understand customers' intent sentiments, product and content affinity over a period of time so that there's a rich data set that's available across this, both these products and at every such touch points we have this rich insight integrated so that we can personalize the whole voice experience. Now this, the voice is available as a plug-in to wherever, you know while there is a standalone product available through our interactive voice and video board that I spoke about earlier is also integrated as a plug-in to our advertising ecosystem so that any brand, anybody who wants to come in and build a conversational experience it is readily available and available in all the 10 languages that I spoke about. I mean these touch points could work across devices it could be a smartphone it could be a feature phone, TV and many of the upcoming device variants. And talking about touch points itself the customer touch points could be it was part of a game during video consumption, music streaming, conversation within the halogy of voice assistant in voice shopping we also, I mean we do also work on RCS messaging which also brings in a combination of text and voice as well, right? Or it could be directly invoked on a browser if they need to be through a standard banner as well. So while all these set, I mean I'm sorry talking a little more tech but all this is available as an integrated piece so and it also provides a rich set of analytics on how consumers are interacting with voice so that us as well as the brands get to know what is working and what is not working so that there's continuous improvement and learning as well on what we offer. Given the data that we provide we can personalize the whole experience target the right brand for the right set of audience through our ecosystem and I believe there are multiple opportunities for brands to engage with our points from our consumers. I'm happy to get into a conversation and discuss more offline depending on you know which of the brands or marketers are interested. Yeah, I'm sure readily there are many people in this sort of audience will reach out to your team on that given your scale and size. Moving to Deepak and this is often getting asked sorry Dilip and in context of a skill or sort of some of the LX activity just wanted to understand what's a success metric you look like though? How does one look at when you're developing any skilled or any of the sort of integration in LX kind of environment? For me more than a metric right I look at as a marker for success right and I'll build upon what Anil and the others spoke before right Anil and Kumar spoke especially but we don't think voice is like a standalone service by itself right. We don't think it is here to replace like the web or the mobile applications is more of a compliment and how can you sort of provide an enhanced experience with voice right and obviously in the web world you think of hey every click I save it's a reduced drop off of my customer funnel right similarly think of voice as a convenience layer right how can you make your experience more delightful more engaging with voice right. So I would say like brands should not start off their voice journey from a pure ROI mindset right they should not say okay I build something for voice how many users did I get immediately on day one right that's not how people approach it when the app boom happened like a decade ago right. So first start testing waters because there is so much to it like Anil was saying voice itself can mean like 10 different things so first start testing waters with what does voice mean in your context right. Second is I think platforms like Google Alexa we have done a lot of heavy lifting in terms of language understanding speech recognition, NLP and the likes right. So the rest of the tech work to be done by brands is not really rocket science. So I would say focus more on the design part focus more on what is the experience you want to build what is the right design you want to have because end of the day in the previous advertising marketing world you would have a one way communication in social media you had a two way but there was no voice to it. Suddenly you have like two way communication and a voice to your brand. So you need to figure out what should your brand personification look like what does truly giving a voice to your brand literally mean right. So think of the design elements I remember one of our partners in the UK I think BBC it was they employed up to 100 people just to design experiences around voice and they had an entire voice division because that's what it would take with all their offerings and services right. So I would say the key metric you should look at is not like how many sales did I drive but how sticky is my use case. Are people finding voice so good I come back and use it again. Otherwise like say how Kumar was saying I used voice once I don't find it useful just to give me I don't come back then there's no point of building it right. So think of engagement stickiness I'll give you a great example of a brand like we had a toothpaste brand builder a voice experience for kids right. The big problem they had was inside was kids don't like to brush their teeth very common in most households right. So that a toothpaste brand cut out nice beautiful stories which lasted for that exactly one minute during the brushing time. So kids could brush and hear those stories and it's connected to that whole activity of brushing made it more joyous right. And they kept coming back and back and back to it. It did it sell more toothpaste brands did it sell more units we don't know but it just resonated so well with that act of brushing and that compliance right. Parents found it very useful for the children. So that's how marketers should also think about using voice and not just as a pure ROA machine. Thanks and I guess there are similar stories from Kumar Kumar you have been sort of working a lot on commerce activation around voice. So what's your experience on that? What kind of sort of directional delta you are seeing on those? Sure. Before that I think I just want to again I find what Dilip said I as a parent have used those toothbrush apps they really made a difference in the way my kids when they were young to actually brush. That one minute or two minute look and they would just brush and go just act and go. They actually waited for the one minute and brush and there were levels that would do. And then actually I'll build the brand too. Well, those guys who remember those brands use the Disney ad and everything that came in they were really connected to it. So all of that earlier. Anyway, so coming back to the question that you actually so we are seeing like voice being adopted like from a voice commerce perspective. Like I think like from that perspective it's like on happening on both B2B and B2C e-commerce place. So for like end consumers to be able to now use it like you and me to be able to use it as a consumer and also for shopkeepers to be able to now use it and distributors and other part of the chain that whole chain to be able to now use it as part of their experience and to do various things. So the kind of common things that we typically see like the use cases that brands actually using like there are five common ones that falls into it. The one, the most natural one is multilingual voice search where people can now discover items by voice but voice also gives the ability to now do things like natural filters saying, hey, show me toothbrush below 200 rupees. Typically which would have had to now first type in toothbrush, then go pick a brand and go do a filter price for them. All of that can be done very easily and more naturally. And even things like that because of the multilingual aspect even the terms that they colloquially connect with they could now use and speak and then they didn't have to remember what exactly the brand calls it as. All of that I think the voice would typically handle. Another thing that was very commonly used is to be able to do voice-guided forms. So when there is a form, a lot of applications have like a form where they have to be able to now you have to onboard the user when onboarding or at later points they have to be able to collect a series of information. Now there are typically a lot of drop-offs happen because people find it either they get distracted away or something happened that there is a lot of drop-offs. Now with a voice-guided form where the voice asks you to keep prompting you keep putting the extra information through voice so they are able to now do things in a multi-task manner and not get distracted. It reduces the drop-off because distractions will always happen but it reduces the number of distractions that will happen. And navigation, another very common one is like navigation where users typically when you land in an app there are a plethora of things that you can do like even in a commerce app or a non-commerce app there are hundreds of things that you can typically do in a popular app. Now users having to be able to now get to that is like always a challenge. They would have to remember the sequence in which they would have to get it. But void navigation is a simple command and more natural than how they imagine what that functionality is. They could speak that on the app and it automatically takes them to that particular page and then lands them there and they can continue the rest of the journey either by touch or continue by using voice whichever last few like voice actions like this is very unique with voice like we are able to now add items to cut with voice. Like I think like Flipkart has done it the Amazon has added some of it and we do throw some of our partners through and we also allow things like list building where the user can now blurt out a sequence of items to get your onion, five kilogram tomato like things like this is keep building out how you traditionally do in a shop scenario and the app is now able to now handle all of that and process that information because this is only possible through voice. This is not possible in a traditional touch-based system but that is another very common use case they do. And last but not least, I think this is again someone has mentioned also the notion of promotions, voice-based promotions like this is another interesting case when our customers like where when they have offers they want to be able to now push an offer like yeah, you have bought two kilograms or so now actually there's an offer to buy three kilograms. Now typically those offers are shown on the screen but people miss out because there's so much of information on the screen but you can push out those most popular offers by a voice and then ask the user a simple SRNOW question and the user now, if he says yes then essentially the promotion gets applied and they're able to now do a bigger cycle. These are some of the common things brands are able to do using voice commerce. Thanks, before I close let me go to Neha for last comment and just wanted to understand how do you see a brand fitting into a Google sort of voice ecosystem and what do you see the role of brand in both environment? Yeah, I think a lot of it has been covered in very interesting conversation but the fact I think every brand has to really thoughtfully think through their voice strategy and I know Dilip and Anil have sort of spoken about it but really not, don't just do voice for the sake of doing voice but make it a very interesting part of the brand strategy. What is the personality? A lot of it, a lot has been spoken but to give you an instance, is your brand more fun? Is your brand more about trust? Your voice patterns will change, the words you use will change, contextualize it. I think voice gives you the medium to sort of have a conversation. So for instance today on the Google Assistant if there's a query in Marathi, the response will be very much on two like Marathi is more around two whereas in Hindi it'll be an app, right? So how are you picking up those cultural nuances when you're designing for your voice strategy where you really connect with the consumer? It is very ubiquitous. So what is the medium you want to use voice on? And eventually I would say, what is the user needs that you're solving? It has to solve for a user need unless it's not solving for a user need. Like simple tasks and it was just spoken about but today if playing music, it typically involves at least five steps, right? You'll have to unlock the phone, you have to search the app, you have to open the app, you have to search for a song, then you play the song. With voice it can be done immediately. So really think through in your journey, I think as a brand is a journey, what is it that the voice can solve for? Like today if I take Ghana for instance, you know, we've been working with Ghana, 25% of their queries are coming through voice. So it is solving for the need, it is engagement. And from our perspective, you know, I guess the ecosystem has to grow, definitely work with your agencies. We are seeing like there is slang lab, we're seeing a whole lot of agencies which are only working from an app perspective, whether it's bolded, arrow AI, et cetera, which are creating for brands and which are creating solutions. We have about one million app actions on Google. You know, we have worked with brands, whether it's Swiggy, where you can just use the Google Assistant order from Swiggy, you know, order from Reliance Fresh, Ola, Uber, Ghana, like, I think it's really about how do you want to use voice to simplify a task for your user as they interact with technology? Yeah. I would have loved to take some question, but I think we have already sort of exited our given time. And really thank you, panelists. And I think your expertise and comment, I've added really a depth to the topic today. Thank you for your insight and bringing out your learning and sharing with the audience here. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.