How voicebots lighten our cognitive load

The announcement of Apple's HomePod smart speaker at last week's WWDC event marks the latest entrant to a growing market for voice assistants, currently led by tech giants Amazon and Google. Each new launch brings the promise of a slicker user experience and a more efficient use of our time. It might take several iterations of these voice assistants to integrate seamlessly into our daily routines, but the first stage for any company looking to take advantage of this new tech will be to ask: How do users feel about it all? We recently partnered with Mindshare Futures and J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group for their Speak Easy research project to answer that very question. Our portion of the study involved observing 102 smartphone users as they carried out a selection of tasks using Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, text-based search, and questions directed to a real person.