The round table "Voice everywhere: is the future in voice commands?" was held in Milan at the Banco BPM auditorium, organized by Banco BPM in collaboration with its online brand Webank as part of the Milan Digital Week. After the opening of the works by Paolo Iabichino aka Iabicus, "Communicator of the year" Pirella Award 2018, representatives of important players from various sectors followed one another who presented their case histories: Stefano Cioffi, Head of Digital Sales and Omnichannel Solutions of Banco BPM, Antonio Bosio, Product & Solutions Manager of Samsung, Federica Manzoni, Brand Communication Manager of BMW and Bruno Pellegrini, CEO and Founder of Loquis.
Already last year Banco BPM enriched the Webank Mobile App with the Voice Commands function that allows the user to manage the account in complete safety, through their smartphone and with simple voice commands. The Voice Assistant allows you to carry out the main banking operations, guide the user in navigating the pages to facilitate and speed up access to the various functions of the App, provide information on the balance and movements of the current account, cards and offer assistance, for example, when searching for the nearest agency. The most used disposition functions are: bank transfer (51%), telephone top-up (11%) and prepaid card top-up (10%).
Bixby is Samsung's artificial intelligence platform, designed to support multiple devices in people's lives with just the use of voice and adapting to the needs of those who use it. It is able to accurately recognize the voice of anyone who interacts with the device and therefore guarantee maximum safety, understand the meaning of words and return replies, notifications and activities consistent with the request formulated. Furthermore, the innovation introduced by this platform has made it possible, in Italy, to create about a hundred jobs and develop new professional skills.
For BMW, the future of the driving experience - and more generally life on board the car - also passes through voice interaction with the vehicle, which becomes the ideal co-driver and travel companion to talk to in a natural way, thanks to the evolution of language recognition and artificial intelligence that allow it to understand voice commands and interact with the driver and passengers. Loquis is the audio augmented reality app that allows people to access a huge archive of localized audio content, organized as thematic maps, created by expert guides, public institutions, travel editors and other users enthusiasts who have decided to share their experiences. All of this becomes oral storytelling, offered to the user on the go when he can't look at the screen of his smartphone and becomes an accompanying soundtrack for his daily travels and journeys.
Therefore, during the round table it emerged that today numerous realities - manufacturers of smart assistants, manufacturers of smartphones and service providers - focus on voice technology, viewed favorably by users as simple, immediate, useful and fast: a human being is in fact capable of typing 40 words per minute, but pronouncing an average of 150. Furthermore, everything that is possible with touch technology is also possible with the voice, which represents the most natural language for humans and allows you to experience surrounding environment and simultaneously interact with technology. The debate was an opportunity to reflect on what is a real revolution we are witnessing in recent years; vocal interaction with one's devices is in fact becoming an increasingly consolidated reality and voice assistants are becoming increasingly precise and interactive thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Even if we are in the early days, the positioning of the main players in various sectors testifies to the growing interest in this type of interaction, whose applicability is almost unlimited and ranges from banking services to entertainment and social issues. Today the real challenge is to interpret the potential that technology will have in the coming years and how much it will be able to fill the gaps to make these interactions less mechanical and more natural.
