How fast can they get there? Let's take a look at recent history to see how quickly consumer adoption can reach 1 billion users: It took about eight years for Facebook and smartphones to reach an installed base of 1 billion. How quickly can the highly active use of personal assistants Shadow Making grow to 1 billion users? Much depends on the completeness of their service offerings. I think it will happen quite quickly. The bigger question is how quickly personal assistants will become a focal point of user activity online. As more and more services are mapped to it, this value proposition will continue to grow, and this growth in functionality will drive the level of user adoption. Each Shadow Making of the major players (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) is doing everything they can to make their personal assistant offerings as comprehensive as possible, and it is this fact that creates new opportunities for all of us as digital marketers. How can you prepare for this coming era of disruption? The first step is to connect your products and services to personal assistants. One of the easiest ways to do this is to start working with Amazon Skills and Actions on Google.
These aren't that hard to work on, and signing up for them early will help you start learning how this world will be different. Anyone can start working with these services to create their own app to connect to Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant respectively. It's Shadow Making easy to use each of them in test mode so you can debug a basic application. Once that works, you can submit your app for acceptance into their respective ecosystems. You can submit an Amazon skill for publication here and find out how to distribute your Google Actions app here. While you're doing this, a big area to explore is conversational interfaces. The first obvious difference is that users will Shadow Making use more natural language when speaking a query or making a request. In the early days of voice interfaces, it will be natural to ask users questions to determine what they want. Be careful to avoid open-ended questions; Instead, learn to ask questions that get them to provide the kind of Shadow Making answers you need to move them forward in your browsing. Confirm that you understand the question before proceeding to the next step. In the longer term, you can imagine that these interfaces will evolve and the language processing programs will improve.
Traditional websites are based on a navigational metaphor, where users navigate their way to the content they want on your site step by step. But imagine a world where a user can express all of their needs at once. For example, imagine a request such as: Get me a large pepperoni pizza with a 12 oz diet coke and deliver it to my home, please use the usual credit card, where the personal assistant can handle any this query at once. We are still a long way from that day, but that is where we are headed, and gaining early experience in these areas will be invaluable. You can Shadow Making get a head start by creating initial smart speaker apps. Here is a summary of the benefits you will get by doing this: You can connect to these app markets quickly, which can give you an advantage in terms of long-term exposure. You can learn to work with conversational interfaces. You can start collecting data Shadow Making on how people use voice to request things in your market. This next wave of disruption is already starting to unfold, and we are already moving out of the early adopter stage, so now is the time to get on board! The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily of Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.