Posted on April 16th, 2023.

Your sitting down and watching an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you see the captain of the ship say “Computer, tea, earl gray, hot” and a cup of hot earl gray tea is magically made. As the credits of the episode start to play you tell say “Alexa, pop me a bag of popcorn.” The bag of popcorn you had put into the microwave earlier now begins to spin as the microwave makes the popcorn to the perfect settings. Little do you know, but this is your second to the last bag, and your Amazon Echo places the order for a new box of popcorn, so you don’t run out for your next movie marathon.

This seems like a wild dream, but this is a reality that is happening in the next few months that anyone could do easily. There is a battle going on from companies to be the personal assistant that a household will choose. The battle they are fighting at the moment is to become a tool you can’t live without just like your smartphone is today. Many people aren’t comfortable saying “Hey Google” and then just talking to their phone to do a task. That is probably how the first people with cell phones felt using it in public, while now it is a common practice.

Companies are willing to invest time, money, and thought power into developing new tools to make it more compelling for a user to have and make it comfortable for them to use. The more a user uses the assistant, the more a company can learn about them. When a child asks the assistant 20 different question about Outer Space, it can give the parent’s account recommendation on space books for kids. It can learn what type of foods you have an interest in cooking as you ask all sorts of questions related to food. The goal of these assistants isn’t to be a speaker to play advertisements, it is a data collection tool that you’ll find very difficult to live without, so whenever you check a phone, more relevant information can be shown to you.

Every company should not make their own digital assistant speaker that a person would need in their house. What they need to do is work with the assistants already out, and create tools that can easily allow customers to integrate with a brand. A simple command of “Alexa, ask Dominos for my easy order” will order your favorite pizza from Dominos and have it delivered, without ever having to look at a phone. As more brand develop same day delivery or hour shipping as advertised in some big cities, the ability to only say what you need will replace the running to a store for one item.

Brands need to make sure that their customers can easily access their products from the assistants. Consumers don’t want to hassle with setting up the use or interacting with in the future. A brand will have to think about how to streamline the process and how to integrate new features that get added to the assistant. The future is bright for brands that embrace this technology.