The use of voice assistants is set to triple over the next few years, according to a new forecast from the U.K.-based analysts at Juniper Research. The firm estimates there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from the 2.5 billion assistants in use at the end of 2018. The majority of those assistants will live on smartphones, where Google Assistant and Siri offer voice assistants to Android and iOS users, respectively. In fact, Google already announced its voice assistant would be enabled on a billion devices as of last month, thanks to its integration with Android. Meanwhile, Amazon's Alexa -- which still primarily lives on smart speakers like Echo -- has reached more than 100 million devices. Juniper, however, predicts that the fastest-growing category for voice over the next several years will not be smart speakers.

Car manufacturers are catching on the new tech wave. After the pandemic hit and social-distancing became our new normal, a personal vehicle became one of the safest ways to travel -- with proper sanitation, of course. And as we're all moving to a touchless future, the automotive industry is no exception. According to the study by Voicebot.ai While analysts from Frost & Sullivan predict that the importance of digital voice assistants in automotive branding will increasingly grow. We believe that in the next few years, voice technology will become one of the key drivers transforming the automotive industry.

As we progress from "the new normal" to "the next normal," businesses are working hard to revise their marketing strategy and develop an omnichannel presence to improve sales in the brave new world of e-commerce. Read on to learn everything you ever wanted to know (and then some) about omnichannel, including what it is, how to build yours with voice commerce, and how to use it to maximize reach and fulfill consumer needs. Recently, Forrester hosted the Engage Digital conference, a virtual adaptation of its annual user event. According to Brendan Witcher, Principal Analyst for Digital Business Strategy, "the next normal" will "involve advances in omnichannel." During his presentation, Witcher noted that it will be necessary for retailers to switch gears to be prepared for the next phase of e-commerce.

Customer's expectations are the guard rails that guide how their relationships progress with any business. The pandemic has made the predictable unpredictable, erasing marketing personas of the past and re-writing them in real-time. Old guard rails and expectations are changing fast. Having an accurate outside-in view from the customer's perspective is the value VoC programs deliver, with the best ones providing data to guide strategy. Pure e-commerce orders have grown 110% since January, and e-commerce revenue has increased by 96%.

Customer's expectations are the guard rails that guide how their relationships progress with any business. The pandemic has made the predictable unpredictable, erasing marketing personas of the past and re-writing them in real-time. Old guard rails and expectations are changing fast. Having an accurate outside-in view from the customer's perspective is the value VoC programs deliver, with the best ones providing data to guide strategy. Pure e-commerce orders have grown 110% since January, and e-commerce revenue has increased by 96%.

Artificial intelligence has the power of transforming anything remotely stupid into an intelligent object! Yes, AI has been doing this for quite some time now and with the rise of voice assistants, things have become more exciting. Businesses around the world, have now understood the importance of "Voice Commerce". It all began with speech-to-text technology developed by Google. 'Google Voice Search' has been launched for iPhones, this advance app utilized data centers so that it can easily compute data and can analyze data, this is actually a good example of human speech.

Nutella-maker Ferrero is trying out voice commerce. The advertiser is one of the first in the U.S. to use the "send me a sample" application, which delivers a free sample-sized jar of its Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread to people who have it installed in either their Amazon or Google voice assistants. Whenever someone repeats the "send a sample" phrase followed by the name of the brand, an order is made by the app, which pulls delivery information either from the Amazon or Google account linked to the voice assistant. Diageo used the app in the U.K., last year, and whereas Diageo was experimenting with calls to action and aspects of sonic branding, Nutella wants to use the intel to gauge whether voice could be the commerce driver it anticipates. Should enough deliveries come via the app -- Diageo's trial had more than 6,000 requests in its first week -- then Nutella will explore other options, said Ferrero's head of e-commerce in the U.S. Rachel Tetreault, who said voice search could be something it looks into later this year.

By the end of 2021, more than 1.6 billion people will use voice assistants on a regular basis, and it is certain they will want to do more than ask about the weather or hear their favourite song. Such assistants will provide retailers with an unprecedented opportunity as consumers use them to find, research and buy products. For this reason, exploring how voice assistants can improve the customer experience is a core focus for many retailers right now. Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is powering voice technology systems and be it Alexa, Siri or Google Home, these platforms are enabling customers to interact with brands in ways that are not only convenient but also highly personalised and contextualised. In a conversational AI world, virtual assistants will search, open, fetch, command and engage the dozen or more websites, portals, apps and systems we all interact with daily.

When we inject "intelligence" into content management systems, from automating menial tasks to analyzing the tone of each piece of content, the possibilities are endless. On the retail side of things, more brands have started harnessing the technology to deliver content, increase engagement, and strengthen brand affinity. Now, B2B brands are catching on creating more innovative business cases as well. To go more in-depth on where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) powered technologies sit in the eCommerce world, our media reporter Laura Myers had a great conversation with Ed Kennedy, Commerce Strategist at Episerver. As Ed pointed out during the interview, the use of AI and ML is rapidly emerging from its initial use case; personalization.

This past summer proved to be the official tipping point for voice-first shopping for many consumers. With Amazon's Echo Dot ranking as the "best-selling product from any manufacturer in any category across Amazon globally" during Prime Day 2017 and Google Home pairing up with Wal-Mart and The Home Depot, the era of AI-assisted selling officially had its breakthrough during the first half of 2017. Additionally, according to a recent Gartner study, sales of voice-activated speakers with artificial intelligence capabilities will reach $3.52 billion by 2021, signaling that adoption of voice-enabled speakers will only continue over the next few years. Though e-commerce continues to gain ground on in-store purchasing, we are collectively a group of consumers who often use our voice throughout our purchasing journeys. Whether it is asking for a different size or color, checking if our product is in stock or simply expressing how we want to pay, we are used to these interactions.