Over 100 Voice AI Predictions for 2021 from 50 Industry Leaders - Voicebot.ai

This represents our fifth annual Voice AI predictions article and there is no question it is the most interesting and insightful to date. It is also the largest with over 100 predictions from 50 voice industry leaders. You will not that some of our guest contributors are confident enough to make multiple predictions. It increases the odds at least one of them will be correct. What is striking for our 2021 issue is the breadth of predictions and the interesting insights. The industry is simply more mature, has seen more, and has a better grasp on what is coming. I enjoyed reading this year's predictions and am sure you will as well. Despite the breadth of topics covered, there are at least two topics that arose with meaningfully higher frequency than the others. Predictions related to the rise of custom assistants were mentioned by at least 11 contributors followed by an increase focus on voice solution while on-the-go. Personalization, both in terms of the user preference and emotion recognition or empathy, and a rise in multimodal user experiences were next in line mentioned by about 10% of the contributors. After that, a number of topics showed some popularity ranging from more rapid voice AI adoption in customer service (including virtual humans) to more growth in voice assistant features for audio media. It was interesting to see two guests (Audrey Arbeeny and Kirill Petrov) mention an expected rise of voice assistant and custom synthetic voices in games, a couple who are optimistic about Apple making a big Siri update this year (Brian Roemmele and Max Child), and how AR might spur voice adoption (Joan Palmiter Bajorek and Craig Sanders).