Getting daily briefings from Alexa or Google Home is a convenient way to get morning news, but imagine if you could get personalized daily briefings about key metrics and priorities for your businesses. That reality isn’t too far in the future with the Salesforce announcement of Einstein Voice Assistant.
Continuing with the trend of artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistants for business, the new voice service would make it possible for Salesforce users to talk to the platform and perform tasks, get briefings and interact with analytics dashboards all through the power of voice. Einstein Voice is slated to be available on any device, stated the press release, including the Salesforce mobile app and smart home devices like Google Home and Amazon Echo.
“We’re in the midst of an incredible technological shift, where the power of voice is fundamentally changing the way we work,” said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and chief technology officer in the release, “Einstein Voice will usher in a new era of conversational customer relationship management(CRM), delivering new levels of productivity and redefining customer experiences with voice technology.”
The voice assistant would allow users to update Salesforce records, create tasks and notify team members, offer personalized daily briefings about schedules, company priorities and metrics, and explore the Salesforce Einstein Analytics dashboard.
Companies could also personalize the assistant with voice bots on the Einstein Bot Platform and create custom commands without having to use code. The voice bots will be connected to Salesforce but are able to work through Google Assistant and Alexa. Salesforce gave this example in the release, “a rental car company could deploy an Einstein Voice Bot to enable their customers to update a reservation with a simple voice command to the smart speaker of their choice. The Einstein Voice Bot would then source responses from knowledge articles in Service Cloud and share verbal answers to help quickly resolve the customer’s case.”
The use of voice assistants for businesses seems to be a growing trend and research shows that it will growing market in the next three years. Gartner statistics show that voice-based queries are the fastest growing search on mobile devices and by 2012, brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search will increase digital commerce by 30 per cent.
Einstein Voice assistant will be in pilot as part of Salesforce’s winter 2019 release and the voice bots will be in pilot earlier, by summer of next year.