In 2018 smart speaker ownership has doubled in the UK. The most popular voice assistant is Amazon Alexa which is part of the Alexa Echo device, followed by Google Assistant which powers Google Home and Google Home Mini, Apple's Home Pod and Sonos One. At the moment people mainly use voice assistants to play music, answer questions, set alarm and reminders. Is there an opportunity there for marketers? Alexa provides a set of built-in capabilities, called skills.

At Transform, an AI-focused event held by VentureBeat in Mill Valley, California, Google VP Scott Huffman, who is in charge of engineering teams for Google Assistant, shared some insights into what it takes to create lasting experiences with voice assistants. For example, becoming part of a person's daily routine helps drive adoption, and Google Assistant commands like "Create a reminder" or "Play music" are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than a Google search query. Huffman did a great job of sharing unique insights from a platform perspective, but that's just one side of the story. On the other side are a host of developers, startups, and service providers making their own third-party experiences that work alongside Google Assistant or Alexa. Below is some tried-and-true advice for successful voice computing from three veterans in the industry. Perhaps more than any other portion of the tech industry, bots and artificial intelligence have made great strides in the past few years, while simultaneously suffering from overmarketed and even false claims.

The 2017 Voice Report is a look ahead at what to expect in the coming chat wars between companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and Amazon. It's also a survey of Google Assistant and Alexa users, and a look into why some startups make more successful Alexa skills than others. The report was put together by VoiceLabs, a voice analytics startup tapped by Google for the launch of its Actions on Google, a platform for the creation of Google Assistant actions. VoiceLabs works with developers making Google Assistant actions and Alexa skills. The company was created last year by Alexandre Linares and Adam Marchick shortly after Marchick stepped down as CEO of mobile marketing company Kahuna, which he cofounded in 2012.