Beyond the most basic point-and-click interactions, commerce in the metaverse will likely require some sort of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice interaction.
This can start with fairly simple voice-based biometric identification for purchases and logins to at least some retailers, banks and other companies. It’s already in use for security verification; at Charles Schwab, callers hear and repeat, “At Schwab, your voice is your password.”
But customer service, support and sales interactions — really, any kind of customer experience more complex than a drop-down menu — will probably require some sort of voice interaction beyond the pick-an-option or describe-in-a-few-words keyword searches common today.
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That means AI-powered voice biometrics will be needed in the metaverse for shopping, marketing, customer service and anything else required to support customer purchases in a virtual reality (VR) setting.
No Hands Available
When a user is inside the metaverse, they are unlikely to be typing on a keyboard, using a console or holding other devices. While wearing a VR headset, their hands will be full with the point-and click joysticks that are used to move avatars and allow them to interact with the virtual worlds.
That’s why voice will be so important. Primary interactions with anyone else in the metaverse must be vocal.
None of this is really unfamiliar to anyone who has ever used Apple’s Siri or Google’s Alexa, and restaurants are already using similar technology.
Read also: Understaffed Restaurants Turn to Robo-Voice Assistants to Take Orders
The technology is already seeing substantial use outside the metaverse, with “healthcare, automobile, retail, eCommerce, banking and human resources aiming to improve customer service through more personalized interactions.” These are among the use cases in which natural language processing and generation “have seen explosive growth rates,” Analytics India magazine said in March.
New Tech Needed
Another aspect of this may well be AI-supported translation tools like the universal speech translator Meta is working on, which “will have no delay due to transcription time,” the magazine reported.
“If the metaverse is supposed to behave like global cyberspace, the language barriers have to be removed,” it added.
That will require everything from finding and implementing the technology to figuring out who (or what), will be the business-to-consumer voice of a company.
“Digital avatars will be a key element of the metaverse, and as avatars hang out and interact with other avatars, just text-based communication won’t suffice; there will be a need for voice communications,” Speech Technology reported in April. “A range of speech technologies — automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and machine translation — must be deployed in the background to enable smooth voice interactions.”
It added that social networks use “a variety of content moderation tools to flag abusive content or filter out content that violates the platform’s safety and harassment prevention policies.”
But they are focused on text and image content, not voice conversations, Speech Technology reported. “[W]e’ll need similar tools for real-time conversations happening in the metaverse.”
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