Watch all the Transform 2020 sessions on-demand here.
Adobe Analytics Cloud can now track the performance of voice-enabled intelligent assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby, marking the company’s first foray into voice analytics and conversational computing.
Adobe chose to enter the voice space now, Adobe Analytics Cloud director of product management Colin Morris told VentureBeat, because improvements in speech recognition and increased adoption rates have brought voice computing to an “inflection point.”
Competition is heating up as companies like Google, Microsoft, and others continue to sell millions of smart speakers and invest in their intelligent assistants. Software development kits are bringing Alexa and Google Assistant and the like to more devices, from Samsung refrigerators to Internet of Things products and cars.
Amazon began to offer voice analytics in April, and Google’s Assistant points developers toward voice analytics startup VoiceLabs.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
The difference in using Adobe Analytics Cloud, Morris told VentureBeat, is its ability to combine datasets and track a customer across multiple devices — from Alexa to the web to offline — thereby increasing the value of insights intelligent assistants can gather.
“We want to make sure we’re flexible and bringing in a lot of different types of data sources to round out what the full customer journey is because at the end of the day, for us it’s all about customer journey analytics,” he said. “Just because you’ve brought somebody to a certain channel or you acquired them or engaged them through a touchpoint, you’ve really got to look downstream to see what the correlations are month over month, year over year between them and other people and [understand] what it really meant to get someone to that channel.”
Adobe thinks voice analytics will become important not just to developers making voice apps but also for brands.
ESPN, which was one of the first companies to create ads for Alexa skills, was also an early tester of Adobe voice analytics. Hyatt Hotels and Marriott International — two of the world’s largest hotel chains — are currently considering whether to use intelligent assistants in their hotels and which assistant to choose. Correlations could be drawn from smart speaker usage to determine the kind of personalized experience a hotel concierge should offer a guest.
Adobe Analytics for intelligent assistants tracks metrics like:
– User ID
– Intent
– Number of users
– Number of sessions
– Session length
– Frequency of use
– Error rate
Above: Adobe voice analytics
One area of analytics that is sure to be valuable when tracking the performance of smart speakers is music. A study by VoiceLabs found that more than 40 percent of smart speaker owners regularly use the device for music, more than for any other reason.
Tracking a customer journey across devices can also allow a company to draw correlations between certain behaviors and certain songs and artists.
“You start to aggregate out the amount of people who play ‘Come Together’ by the Beatles, and all of a sudden ‘Come Together’ becomes a much more interesting metric at scale,” he said. “Whether it’s music or whether it’s ordering pizza or whatever it is that you’re using the voice assistant stuff with, you can start to build out a richer customer profile.”
