Nick Laidlaw and Wendy Karlyn present to Boston University Questrom School of Business

Nick Laidlaw, CTO of Voicify, spoke at Boston University Questrom School of Business this week about trends in voice, major voice platform providers, and voice SEO. He was accompanied by Wendy Karlyn, of Rightpoint, a Boston based customer experience agency that is a partner of Voicify.

Professor Garret Johnson invited Laidlaw and Karlyn to speak to his MBA and Undergraduate classes. The presentations were very well received. The combined industry expertise of Laidlaw and Karlyn, both with extensive backgrounds in the digital agency world culminated in a dynamic and engaging presentation to the students at Boston University.

The presentations opened with an overview on Digital Transformation and how is it evolving with Voice. The growth trends and statistics surrounding voice are staggering. According to comScore, 50% of searches will be done via voice by 2020. Voice assistants are becoming omnipresent in our daily routines, and the college graduate and undergraduate audience is undoubtedly keen on this trend. This year, 24.9 million US millennials will use a smart speaker. That’s more than a third of the millennial population and a 38.3% increase from 2017, according to eMarketer estimates. The students were immediately engaged in the conversation.

A key takeaway from the presentation was the need for brands to embrace technology to meet consumer demand. This means that brands need a presence on all the various channels that consumers now expect to find a brand. Namely, voice assistants.

Laidlaw and Karlyn went on to introduce a primer on the various platform providers, including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Chatbots, and Microsoft Cortana. These many platforms, each with their own project development process and regulations, lead to a complex voice landscape that deters some brands from getting started with the voice space. By giving a live demo of the Voicify platform, Laidlaw was able to show how the Voicify Voice Experience Platform solves this problem by allowing creative agencies, like Rightpoint, to create voice apps for brands once and deploy across the many platforms.

A demonstration of how to create a voice application using Voicify excited the audience and sparked even more conversation around the possibilities of voice for brands. The presentation was eye opening for many students, who were left with a broader view on Digital Transformation and how it is evolving with Voice.

About Rightpoint

Rightpoint is an independent customer experience agency with technology at its core. We create impactful digital experiences driven by insight, strategy, design, and technology to help clients succeed at the speed of innovation. Rightpoint serves more than 250 Fortune 1,000 companies, has been named one of Crain’s 50 Fastest Growing Companies in Chicago for four consecutive years. Rightpoint is the largest independent agency with 450 employees across 10 offices. For more information, visit rightpoint.com.