Amazon’s Alexa offers more than 25,000 skills—the set of actions that serve as applications for voice technology. Yet Domino’s is one of a relatively small number of brands that has seized the opportunity to enter your home by creating a skill of its own. Now that Amazon Echoes and Google Homes are in kitchens and living rooms across the country, they open a window into user behavior that marketers previously only dreamt of. But brands’ efforts to engage consumers directly via voice have been scattershot. The list of those that have tried is sparse: some banks; a couple of fast food chains; a few beauty companies; retailers here and there. Building a marketing plan for Alexa has been a risky venture. That’s because, when it comes to our virtual assistants, no one knows what the hell is going on.

But if 2017 was the year that Alexa hit the mainstream, 2018 will be the year that advertisers begin to take her seriously by investing time and money in figuring out how to make use of her. The shift toward a screenless, voice-first future has been slow and awkward. Without a playbook on how exactly to employ this technology, brands have been paralyzed. But the staying power of voice technologies is now universally accepted, and their ubiquity no longer belongs to a far-off future.

A few brands have already begun to infiltrate the space. On Alexa, you can order your regular Starbucks drink, call an Uber, or check the balance of your Capital One account. But soon competition will mount, the wheels will begin to turn, and the experimentation that’s already begun will spread, writ large, throughout the industry.

Amazon’s joke-telling, timer-setting unicorn of a product has become a standard device in homes across the country, and her audience is only growing. This holiday season alone, 12 million virtual assistants will be sold, according to audio advertising firm XAPPmedia. As companies race to catch up to the success of Amazon’s Alexa (Google has come the closest, though it still seems to be following Amazon’s lead), it’s becoming clear that the future is screenless. Alexa’s pervasiveness bring us closer to a new phase, in which the voice interface facilitates seamless interaction with the world around us. We have spent years with our heads down, buried in a rectangular, two-dimensional universe. We’re quickly moving toward a heads-up world, and Alexa is just beginning to prop up our chins.

But there’s a good reason that companies haven’t gotten in on the conversation. Alexa is young and confusing, and its invisible platform, which doesn’t have the universally understood directives (like, say, a back-button) that allow web pages to be easy for anyone to understand, makes it difficult for brands to get a lay of the land. To developers and consumers alike, Alexa is still an enigma. Though most Amazon Echo owners engage their device multiple times a day, they’re typically repeating the same three or four tasks, according to James McQuivey, a principal analyst for ForresterTech.

Even Amazon is continuing to figure out new uses for Alexa—just last month, the company launched a new initiative to adapt the tool for use at work. Cody Simms, a partner at the startup accelerator Techstars, predicts that the experimentation will continue until developers identify a transformative experience: something that shifts the technology from a toy to a powerful tool, the way search engines shaped the internet. “We’re still in the process right now of people even figuring out what those sort of killer experiences are,” Simms says. “We’re starting to see companies really experiment with interesting use cases around voice.”

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com