 quickly move on to the next session and it's time for some crystal gazing. Our next session is with Sarah Salter, Head of Innovation, WaveMaker, who will tell us what the future of voice in marketing is. Over to you, Sarah. Thank you so much. I'm just gonna hopefully manage to pull up my screen one second. So firstly, thank you very much for having me. Super excited to be here today. I am very much gonna talk to kind of the future of voice and share with you how we're seeing the future of voice and how we're very much kind of seeing its future in marketing and advertising. So I think in the past, marketers are very much kind of given voice technology a respectable nod, but this year we very much expect to see a shift where voice and conversational AI will play a much more central role in those marketing plans. And this is very much kind of driven by a few factors. Essentially we're entering a new era in voice with two key drivers converging to create this big moment in time. The rise of intelligent applications and also AI that creates a more personalized web experience and then meeting this paradigm shift that is voice as the next stage of user interface. I'm sure many of you have seen this happen in your own households, but the pandemic has very much accelerated the adoption of new technology at home by potentially three to four years. Many researchers stating that families will become much more reliant on voice enabled devices over the next five years. And voice growth is very much coming from kind of what was talked about earlier, this intuitive nature and the rapid adoption of technology amongst younger audiences, many of whom are growing up with assistants being spoken to multiple times around their house. And a lot of research has shown that parents are now putting voice assistants in baby's bedrooms from birth. We're also seeing as we touched on earlier, seven year olds essentially using voice to select what they're gonna watch, search for information or even ask what time dinner will be ready. I have a six year old son and he already chooses voice over dials, controls and buttons. And he picks voice for its speed, its convenience and because he genuinely believes that Alexa is part of our family. His conversations with voice assistants are very natural and intuitive. He'll even argue with Alexa and he'll keep reframing his question until he gets an answer. Whereas my conversations are as a digital native, they're very search focused and they're very demand driven. I might ask Alexa to play a song, whereas my son would ask Alexa to have a dance with him and pick a song that they both like. Just kind of showing how he very much speaks to this technology in a completely different voice native way. A lot of people also, a lot of children also believe that Alexa is a real person. A lot of research has shown that people think there's actually a real person sitting inside that voice device. And what to expect? So by 2030, we believe that every brand will have a personalized voice and that conversational marketing will truly be the future of customer experience. Perfect, thank you. So as I mentioned, studies have anticipated voice assistants becoming much more conversational, joining in with family conversations more naturally, but also with personalized content, being able to make dinner recommendations, being able to pick brand preferences for people. And if you go on to the next slide, what's gonna be really interesting is that voice will essentially play a role in every aspect of our lives. We'll see voice powered interaction expand beyond the car and smartphone and smart home to new areas of mobility and other unexpected areas. Voice will be in retail, in transit, in travel and the public will become much more accustomed to choosing voice as one of several ways to interact with a product. So within the same product, people will discover that sometimes it's easier to speak while other times it's easier to touch or type. They'll realize that voice and the option to use voice is not just a novelty and the results will be that there will be even more products that will be voice enabled and will allow people to interact in a manner that suits them. Next, essentially the net effect is an emerging channel that is already mass. I'm based in the UK and in the UK alone, we have 86% of the UK public having used a voice assistant in the last six months and we're seeing huge stats globally from this increase. So on the next slide, I'm going to just kind of touch on essentially five of the biggest trends and emerging technology in voice innovation. That's the ubiquity of voice, touching on the growth of voice social. It's application in retail and voice commerce, multi-sensory experiences and going into some kind of deep learning and synthetics. I'm very much going to kind of touch top line on these areas because obviously they're vast and hopefully give you some good examples. So next, essentially voice will be available everywhere. Every home, every product, it will become standard on appliances and what we're seeing from voice manufacturers is brands like Amazon have already brought Alexa to property managers. They're aiming to have entire homes that are smart home enabled and make it easier for property managers to set up and maintain their smart homes. But perhaps the biggest opportunity is voice on the go. And the mobility industry is very much on the cusp of revolution, electrification, connected and autonomous driving and shared mobility. And what we're seeing is these automakers investing in their own voice controlled assistance. However, research is showing that car owners are increasingly preferring familiar voice assistants like the ones they have in their home over those specifically designed by automakers. And we're seeing just this huge increase in AI powered in vehicle voice assistants. And the possibilities to utilize that time whilst driving and connecting on the go are endless. And then finally, we're also seeing voice integrated into applications, integrated into websites. This example is Snapchat where you can now search for your lens via voice. And essentially it will make those complicated website mobile navigations much simpler. It will kind of go from being very much nice to have which brands are looking at it right now to an expectation. And it will also allow marketers to focus much more on context. So how and when they communicate. And on the next slide, I'm just gonna play you an example. And this is essentially a product that we have developed with nationwide bank. And it's a hyper local voice skill. And this voice skill was very much designed with auto in mind. And it's the idea essentially that whilst you're on the go that's the time when you're keeping your eye out for new properties that you might want to buy. If you don't mind pressing play, I'll let the video do the talking. Alexa, open nationwide local voices. Welcome to nationwide local voices from nationwide building society. Find out what life is really like in 20 of Bristol's most diverse and vibrant neighborhoods. You can hear from people who live in Bristol about the culture, community, and the places in their neighborhoods. Hi, I'm Ben and I live in Montreal. Bathville had a lot of families. One of the best things about Kings Island is there's so many places to go out in the evening and meet people. So we moved to Brisbane to about 17 years ago A lot of the traders at this market, they're local people that are setting up their own businesses. It's the first outdoor market in the Northwest has ever had. Thanks for listening to nationwide local voices from nationwide building society. Goodbye. Just an example of how we're really kind of thinking context first and looking at the future of audio in car and voicing car. And now moving on to kind of one of the other big trend areas. And this is the future of social media. And we truly believe that the future of social media is audio and voice. I've evidence this kind of on the left hand side by the rise in voice only platforms and also the recent purchase of locker room by Spotify. Voice content essentially is perceived as being more personal and more informal than text. People can create more content at a much faster rate. So the average person speaks three times as fast as they can type. So it's a great way to be able to put more content out into the world. So why is this use case taken off? I think humans stuck at home during quarantine readily available smartphones and apps, the lights of Clubhouse, for example, and the desire for human connection beyond text. And probably the fatigue of just too many Zoom calls as well. Essentially, there's a huge opportunity in this space and an opportunity for brands to be first to market through emerging ad opportunities. So sponsored audio influences, live voice, commerce, promoted rooms and content that could be extended from social platforms into branded podcasts, potentially. The opportunities are really endless in social. And it's just a huge moment to be able to kind of experiment. The next area I want to just touch on is retail. So going on to the next slide, voice essentially will replace touch in many situations due to the health concerns post a pandemic. The challenges of the pandemic are unleashing completely new use cases for voice first systems from the obvious kind of touchless functions to much more friendly food ordering. Voice will just continue to rise throughout this year. It will make its way into retail stores, restaurants and any facility where voice can reduce friction and promote that contactless transaction. The other area. Next slide, please, in retail is essentially shopping and voice will essentially change the way that we shop. And a great example of this is Alexa and Whole Foods. So essentially what you do is you would put in your your buds or through your phone and talk to Alexa. And this is an example where essentially Alexa will guide you through a Whole Foods market. It will tell you where to find the products on your shopping list or it will help inspire you and tell you where to find the ingredients on the shelf for a specific dish. And I think this is a really great example for marketers to be really thoughtful about how they can kind of build those in retail voice experiences by building those helpful inspiring audio nudges in that path to purchase and combining those physical and digital retail experiences. And on the next slide, I just wanted to touch on how also we can open up new shopping environments. And I touched on the car use case before and I think it's a very early example, but it really is only just getting started. Being able to shop for groceries or to take out from the car creates completely new environments where people will be able to shop. And as I mentioned, almost most major car manufacturers are adding in car voice assistance. And the Amazon Alexa auto, which you can see on this picture is equipping older vehicles with voice assistance. So essentially, you can soon order the flowers you forgot for someone's birthday, place a bet on a big game or, you know, purchase an audiobook impulsively. And you can do all of that without taking your eyes off the road and also filling that dead time, you know, where you're just driving often and looking for something to interact with and do. It is a huge, huge opportunity for voice retail. And next, please. And then kind of going into the area of multisensory sound is well known for either entertaining or providing helpful factual information. But also sound is feeling. It plays a really important role in adding depth and dimension to the digital world, and it can also help enhance our real world experiences. And up until now, the digital world is predominantly through visual and there's a great article that Microsoft have written about where this sensory imbalance of just being visual can cause us to feel overwhelmed, distracted, depressed. And this is actually an opportunity to tap into the unique way that voice sound can evoke a feeling, a memory and emotion and help capture and hold our attention in much more interesting ways. Next slide, please, is a great example, essentially, of capturing that full attention is an example from Darkfield Radio. And it's an experience that's been created just primarily using voice and audio. And essentially, this experience, I watched a YouTube video with somebody describe the experience and they said through sound alone, they felt like they could feel the breath of someone on the back of their neck. Super creepy, but very, very powerful. And I think very much like the early days of other media, we need to be exploring, experimenting and inventing new combinations of sensory experience and finding new ways to connect the digital world with our physical and emotional worlds. We need to develop a creative process and methodology to help us design across the senses and across all devices. And then touching on my last area on the next slide, please. And this is very much around deep learning and synthetics. We are already seeing a huge number of brands explore synthetic technology from personalized messaging to personalized assistance. And this is an example from Nestle, where they essentially created their own cookie coach to solve the problem of customers getting different advice on how to bake the perfect cookie from their customer assistance. And this example on the right hand side from Lays shows how future customer experiences need to feel bespoke and personal. They essentially created a chat interface that would allow you to have a dialogue between the customer and Lionel Messi, the footballer. And these synthetics and these kind of personalized voice experiences are only going to grow. And if you could go to the next slide and just play a very short clip of this. Really, I think where the opportunity potentially lies is in the incredible, incredible advancement of synthetic voices. And this video, essentially, next slide, please. Shows this huge advancement in synthetic voice and the emotion and the realism that can be built into it. If you just maybe play the first 20 seconds just so you can kind of get a feeling for it, that would be great. Is it not allowing you to play? No, it's not allowing you to play. Let me see if it will allow. Let me see if it will allow me to play one second. OK, if you guys share your screen again, you should just be able to hear my sound for the video, which might work, given it's audio. If I'm lucky, I hear her. It's like she's right here with us. Her warmth, her love. That is her. I just don't understand. So just an example, hopefully you all heard that. OK, let me see if I can come out of there now. The computer is not playing ball. OK, great. If you don't mind the deck back up. So essentially, there are five opportunities to achieve an unfair growth advantage in voice. Firstly, we need to focus on the context. So very much like we've done with nationwide, what are those moments where people are going to be needing your brand and where can you be there for them? We need to utilise, test and learn through emerging social opportunities. Social voice is huge and nobody is yet taking full advantage of it. Building helpful or inspiring voice nudges into that path to purchase, defining how voice should make the audience feel and not just think and owning a persona with a branded voice assistant and thinking about bringing in synthetic voices. And finally, you know, essentially, who better to kind of quote in our summary if you don't mind going to the last slide than Vanessa Go at Spotify, who really kind of states why audio has and always will be such a powerful way to connect with audiences. Essentially, you can close your eyes, but you cannot close your ears. Thank you very much and sorry for the slight technical hitches. They always happen, right? Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah. And what a wonderful session that was. So this small glitch in the digital world is what the transition is all about. And we can't really do anything about that. But wonderful session nonetheless. Thank you.