Voice Activated news and trends

Almost Half of Consumers Want Voice AI Tech to Manage Schedule Changes
artificial intelligence // July 30, 2023

Trust and capability considerations continue to rank high on the list of concerns limiting broader adoption of technology.  Smartphones are a technological marvel with a searing practical limitation: touchscreens. These all-but-essential computers can quickly become all but useless when in the rain or when consumers...

Millennials Willing to Pay For Smart, Conversational Voice Assistant
Mobile Commerce // April 25, 2023

Consumers want to make their daily routines simple and more connected, and hands-free voice-activated technologies can fit the bill. Consumers already use voice assistants to find information, play music or find and book airline tickets, among many other possibilities. Consumers performed an average of six tasks...

Voice Assistants Will Open a New Front in Online Grocery Wars
Voice Activation // July 08, 2022

Home is where the heart is — and home is where there will be a new, digital and audible front in the war over grocery shopping. In the latest PYMNTS “ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: The Rise of The Smart Home,” nearly  2,700 U.S. consumers in May...

Voice Tech Holds Key to Unlocking Biometric Security’s Full Potential
Biometrics // November 30, 2021

Speech is powerful — signaling intent, signaling what we need and want. And speech, in the service of commerce, can be powerful, too. Collin Davis, chief technology officer of Pindrop, said that we’re a long way from unlocking voice as a conduit to making payments...

Interviews & Exclusives
Voice Tech Holds Key to Unlocking Biometric Security’s Full Potential

November 30, 2021
Speech is powerful — signaling intent, signaling what we need and want. And speech, in the service of commerce, can be powerful, too. Collin Davis, chief technology officer of Pindrop, said that we’re a long way from unlocking voice as a conduit to making payments and banking truly hands-free. He said that value can be […]

This Week In Payments: Feeding The Hunger For Innovation, Sometimes Literally

January 10, 2020
The payments and commerce ecosystem got busy getting busy this week as the first full week of 2020 kicked off the press releases began raining down from the sky from...

Fiserv: Why Gas Is Just The Start Of What Alexa Will Pay For

January 10, 2020
While there were many attention-grabbing announcements coming out of the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), among the more eye-opening was the joint announcement by ExxonMobil, Amazon and Fiserv that paying...

Alexa’s Expanding Ecosystem

January 08, 2020
When Alexa was first introduced in November 2014, it didn’t look much like the next big thing in user interfaces. There wasn’t very much like it in the market at...

Quick Reads
Alexa Conversations To Get More Natural

June 06, 2019
Amazon has announced the launch of Alexa Conversations, a new deep learning-based approach that developers can use for creating natural voice experiences on Alexa with less effort, fewer lines of code, and less training data. “This new model helps developers create natural, flexible dialogs within a single skill and in the upcoming releases brings multiple […]

Amazon Pay Debuts Alexa Delivery Notifications For All Merchants

May 20, 2019
Amazon has announced the launch of Alexa delivery notifications for all merchants via Amazon Pay. “We’ve gone from typing and touching to swiping and now to talking, each mode of...

Amazon Wants Alexa To Track Medicine, Provide Health Data

April 08, 2019
Amazon.com is aiming to enable Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant, to keep tabs on customers’ medicine and provide personal health updates. As part of an effort to expand into healthcare,...

Amazon’s Alexa Now Offers HIPAA-Compliant Skills

April 04, 2019
Amazon just entered a whole new market now that Alexa, its voice-activated digital assistant, is HIPAA-compliant, which it means it can handle patients’ sensitive information. In a blog post, Amazon announced an...