The total number of Smart Speakers (Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Siri) owners has reached over 50 million and the numbers continues to rise. Google revealed that more than one Google Home Smart Speaker product was sold every second between October and December in 2017. With that type of adoption expected again this year (for Google, Amazon, and potentially Apple), 2019 should see large scale mainstream adoption of Smart Speaker and voice technology.

What can your company, business or brand do to utilize Smart Speakers and voice technology? How can you reach your customers in their home, without them ever having to log on to a laptop, or pick up their phone? We will discuss some of the most popular Alexa Skills and Google Actions use cases for businesses, in Voice Technology today.

Also, what exactly is an Alexa Skill or a Google Action? How does someone go about creating one and how difficult is it to build one. We will look at the third party tools and development options available to create Voice Apps and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Finally, this will be the first in a series on voice technology, we will start fairly high level and get into more and more detail each month. If there are individual topics you would like to see covered, please add them in the comments below.

Ken Sakal is the founder of Vohesu (https://www.vohesu.com/), developers of Virtual Health Assistants for patients with chronic diseases. Ken has spoken at the Voice Summit 2018, the largest voice tech conference that brings the conversational design ecosystem together and has been featured on various podcasts.