New AI voice features and use cases explored
How companies are integrating new voice features and capabilities into their products. 25+ examples from Perplexity, Shopify, Notion, Microsoft and more.
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In a recent DoP poll, almost 50% of respondents said they interact with software through voice. I have to say, I was pretty shocked that so many people say they interact with products through voice as it’s really not something I spend much time doing day to day (aside from an occasional, often frustrating chat with Alexa).
Historically, to me at least, voice has always seemed like a UX pattern that sounds like the next big thing in theory, only to fall flat on its face in practice.
How exactly could people ever sit at their desks speaking over each other to get things done?
This is still true, but with hybrid working is perhaps less of an issue. And now, thanks to the power of LLMs and vast improvements in AI voice technologies with latency reductions, speech to speech and other technical improvements, voice is firmly back on the agenda of some of the world’s top product execs.
Just this month, Meta acquired a voice AI startup, voice generation ElevenLabs is now valued at $3.3 billion, a sizable 22% of YCombinator’s most recent startups were voice based and recent studies show 55% of Gen Z is using voice to control software.
To prove just how far AI voice technology has come, here’s this entire introduction read by my synthetic voice replica in ElevenLabs.
In this Deep dive, we’ll explore real world examples of how companies like Microsoft, Shopify, Perplexity and others are building voice-enabled features into their products. This can include use cases like customer service, UX enhancers, productivity boosters and more. If you’re interested in exploring some of the potential ways voice could be used in your own product, then this deep dive should hopefully help.
Coming up:
25+ real-world examples from companies like Shopify, Microsoft, Perplexity, and more showing how voice is transforming everything from customer onboarding to coding workflows
The new standalone products like that let you add voice capabilities to your own product - including one that boosted one company’s sales by 15%
An explanation of the new technologies powering this trend
New tools you can use to add voice capabilities to your own product
What you’ll get in this DoP Deep
This analysis includes 25+ different examples of new AI voice features and use cases. Here’s a snapshot of the AI voice features and use cases:
Company - includes over 25+ different examples from different companies including B2C and B2B SaaS.
Voice feature / use case - this includes multiple different use cases and features to give you some inspiration for your own products. Voice interfaces, call center agents, AI Assistants, browsing agents and more.
Category - more on that below.
How it works - an explanation of how it works.
Link - link to more info.
The categories explained
Assistant - a dedicated AI assistant that includes voice support e.g. Shopify’s AI assistant that you can “call” up to help with customer service issues and onboarding.
UX enhancers - the application of voice to improve the overall UX.
Customer service - voice used in customer service, either through dedicated AI assistants or through call centers, powered by AI.
Agents - AI agents that have voice capabilities.
Productivity - the use of voice AI to help users improve productivity by getting things done more quickly or efficiently.
Standalone product - as well as new voice features, you’ll get a selection of new standalone products and starts suitable for product teams who want to augment their product or ops processes with AI.
A closer look at the voice features, use cases and new voice products you can use in your product
Let’s take a closer look at each of the voice features and use cases from some of the world’s top companies.