In 2018, Apple commissioned the legendary Spike Jonze to create the award-winning advertisement “Welcome Home.”
Jonze brought on the UK’s own FKA Twigs, who stars in the video, to paint a picture of the role HomePod, Apple’s smart speaker, can play within one’s life.
If you re-watch this advertisement today - work of art seems a better descriptor than mere “ad” - and think of it as the portrayal of the role voice and AI has played amidst a global pandemic, it becomes utterly prescient.
The video paints a fascinating picture of a tired woman retreating into her urban apartment, who looks to the HomePod to play me something I’d like…which then launches a radical re-shaping of the woman’s environment and altered reality.
It’s a great segue to new survey results released by Adobe, which indicate that 2020 has seen more households adopt smart speakers, and more households use smart speakers more often.
The coronavirus has led to 39% of survey respondents saying they own a smart speaker, up from 28% two years ago.
Further, 46% of smart speaker owners said they used the devices more amidst the height of the pandemic than they had previously.
But most interesting of all is what the survey showed about voice advertising:
58% of consumers find smart speaker advertising to be less intrusive than other advertising formats - up from 43% in May 2019.
53% of consumers said smart speaker advertising led them to ultimately make a purchase, up from 39% in May 2019.
In a previous This Week In Voice VIP letter, we discussed how amidst the pandemic, consumers have largely been willing to table privacy concerns to embrace smart speakers, voice assistants, and AI.
Well, as it turns out, those same consumers have been willing to overlook voice ads too, acclimating to them.
It’s hard to imagine the stretched, altered world that the pandemic has ushered in, suddenly just snapping back to some previous state.
It’s much easier to envision that this is a jumping off point for new voice-first, AI-driven applications in our lives.
Welcome home.
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