Early adopters of visual, voice-search in websites will increase digital revenues by 30%: Report

Key highlights:

• Early adopters that redesign their websites to support visual and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%
• Consumer demand for voice devices is expected to generate $3.5 billion by 2021
• They will gain competitive advantage as measured in conversion rates, revenue growth, new customer acquisition, market share and customer satisfaction

Early adopters that redesign their websites to support visual and voice-search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%, predicted a Gartner report. It said that voice and visual-search based queries improve marketers' understanding of consumers' interests and intent.

Coupled with the additional contextual cues available from smartphones, early adopter brands and commerce sites will capitalise on consumers' shift to these search modalities. They will gain competitive advantage as measured in conversion rates, revenue growth, new customer acquisition, market share and customer satisfaction, it added.

It says that consumer demand for voice devices used by products such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, is expected to generate $3.5 billion by 2021.

We have already seen several brands such as Apple, Amazon and even Google create voice enable devices such as speakers, laptops and other devices using this.

Brands that are able to develop ways to leverage systems that can take a hand-off from the devices will see rapid growth in digital commerce revenue.

Some of the visual and voice-search technology that will support digital businesses include virtual personal assistant, immersive technology such as augmented reality and virtual reality, machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI), 3D printing, wearables, location tracking, 3D cameras, biometrics authentication, chatbots and wireless power charging.

Currently, very few websites support any of such technology. The few which do mainly have AI, location tracking or chatbots in their websites. This technology seems to be growing at a faster speed among brands.

Some of the other predictions in the report include five of the top seven digital giants will willfully self-disrupt to create their next leadership opportunity. It said that digital giants such as Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Tencent are likely to run into situations where their influence has grown so large that it is difficult to create new value scenarios. This, it said, ultimately leads to self-disruption.

By 2021, more than 50% of enterprises will be spending more per annum on bots and chatbot creations than traditional mobile app developments.

It also predicted that in 2020, AI will become a positive net job motivator, creating 2.3 million jobs while eliminating only 1.8 million jobs.

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