Smart speaker skills have proliferated but most reporting I've read suggests there has been little actual usage of these skills. Instead, smart speakers are mostly used for listening to broadcast terrestrial radio, listening to music, setting timers/alarms/reminders, and getting the weather/news.
If I worked on a smart speaker project (in particular, Alexa), I would try a Trojan horse to get people to develop habits to use the speaker more in order to exploit its potential.
Two specific ideas:
One: team up with public radio to allow listeners to contribute to pledge drives by voice. This feels less commercial and more altruistic and so would be a nice path to getting people comfortable with purchasing by voice. For those without linked credit cards (is that even possible with Alexa? Maybe if Google wanted to do something similar with Google Home as Google has fewer credit cards on file), the system could at least take a command to send an email reminder with a simple one-click donation button for an amount already specified. I think of this as a variation of Amazon Smile.
Two: work with radio (and podcasters) to make ads (including those on public radio - there's no lack of them) voice-aware by offering discounts or similar promotions to those who indicate interest by voice. Again, expanding people's comfort zones with new voice interactions would seem useful to get Alexa to where Amazon would like Alexa to be. This is a variation of the promotional code which appears on lots of podcast advertisements; those codes feel anachronistically low-tech. A smart speaker knows your email address - why memorize a code if the speaker can simply send it to the listener? This of course would create valuable information on engagement and interactivity for marketers by proving that people are listening to ads and showing concrete follow-up (promo codes would be custom and thus much better than the wholesale generic codes now being used that don't directly link listening with use of the code). I think of this as matching the evidence based marketing of Google Ad clicks.
To be clear, I'm perfectly happy without another intrusive, advertising platform but was just thinking about the strange stagnation and limited use cases of the voice platforms given the presumed interest in Amazon of using Alexa to embed itself more deeply in our transactional lives.
