Voice Assistants and Skills: Is There a Business Case?
Key takeaway
Voice works when the user's hands or eyes are busy and the task is short with a predictable vocabulary — in a car, a kitchen, a warehouse, or a workshop. As a marketing channel it disappoints: discovery is poor and most published skills are used once and forgotten.
Voice interfaces have moved from novelty to ordinary in the home, and every marketing department has been asked whether the company needs a skill. The honest answer is usually no — with specific, valuable exceptions.
Where voice genuinely wins
- Hands and eyes occupied — driving, cooking, operating machinery, working at height, handling stock.
- Short, well-defined tasks: check a status, record a reading, add an item, start a timer.
- Accessibility, where voice is not a convenience but the difference between usable and not.
- Repetitive data capture in the field, where speaking is dramatically faster than typing on a device with gloves on.
Why consumer voice projects disappoint
- Discovery is poor: there's no browsable shelf, and users must remember an invocation phrase exactly.
- Retention is worse — most consumer skills are tried once. Without a recurring need, there's no reason to return.
- There's no screen for browsing, comparison, or complex choices, which rules out most commerce.
- Every interaction is a conversation you must design for misrecognition, interruption, and silence.
Designing for speech is not designing a menu
- People phrase the same request a dozen ways. Enumerate real phrasings from actual users rather than inventing a grammar.
- Keep responses short. Anything longer than a couple of sentences is unlistenable, and the user cannot skim.
- Confirm before anything consequential, and never take an irreversible action on a single unconfirmed utterance.
- Design the failure path deliberately: what happens on the second and third misunderstanding, and how does the user escape.
- Handle noisy environments — which is precisely where the hands-busy use cases live.
Privacy and trust
Voice data is sensitive, and users are rightly wary of always-listening devices. Be explicit about what's recorded and retained, avoid capturing anything confidential by voice in shared spaces, and remember that a device in a home or a shared workspace has no reliable notion of who is speaking. That last point rules voice out for anything requiring individual authorisation unless paired with another factor.
How to evaluate a proposal
Ask what task becomes possible or meaningfully faster, for whom, and how often they'll do it. If the answer is "it would be good for the brand", that's a campaign, and there are cheaper campaigns. If the answer is "our technicians record readings while holding a tool", there's a real case with a measurable saving.