Voice technology has taken off in the West. What can we expect from voice technology in Asia?
Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are already enjoying great success throughout Asia, but homegrown options may soon be getting more traction. This is partly because American technology companies have been relatively slow to add Asian languages to their voice assistant and smart speaker devices.
As of March 2020, Google Assistant’s only Asian languages are Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. While the lack of Chinese languages is notable, Google’s products and services are still unavailable in Mainland China due to regulatory concerns, meaning that Chinese will probably not be a high priority for the American company.
Alexa’s only Asian language remains Japanese.
Apple’s Siri runs a bit ahead of the pack, supporting Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Malay, and Thai. This still leaves Vietnamese, Indonesian, Burmese, and many other Asian languages without voice assistant support from any of the major American players.
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A lot of room for voice technology growth in the Asian market
With just over 4 billion speakers of Asian languages, there is a lot of room for growth in the Asian market. This is especially the case as Asian consumers have started to become more comfortable integrating voice assistants into their lives, and as the coronavirus is driving consumers towards touchless technology.
iProspect reports that 62% of smartphone users in China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Singapore have used voice-activated technology in the last six months. Over half had used it in the last one month.
According to Entrepreneur, purchases of smart speakers have increased in China, India, and Indonesia over the last six months, while they have stabilized in Australia, Japan and Singapore.
In India, Google was found to be the most widely-used voice assistant by the respondents followed by Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, Samsung’s Bixby came in fifth, according to a report prepared by WAT Consult. But without support for Indian languages such as Bengali and Telugu, the future of Google in India will likely depend on whether they can add more Indian languages before an Asian company gets there first.
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Which Asian Languages Should Voice Technology Providers Target Next?
Besides the CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) powerhouse languages, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian are obvious choices. But voice technology companies should also think beyond the more conventional linguistic contenders.
Languages like Mandarin, Hindi, and Indonesian may have more political clout in their highly multilingual countries, but let’s not forget that millions of potential consumers speak Indian languages like Bengali (230 million), Marathi (83 million) and Telugu (81 million).
Chinese languages like Wu (Shanghainese) have 80 million speakers. Min is spoken by 70 million speakers.
Remember, while all Chinese languages use more or less the same writing system (Traditional or Simplified versions of Chinese characters) voice assistants must be trained to accept varying pronunciation. Chinese languages (often mistakenly called dialects) are mutually unintelligible to each other, meaning that separate technology must be developed for each Chinese language.
More than 95 million people speak the Indonesian language of Javanese, making it the 21st most spoken language in the world, with far more speakers than languages like Italian or Greek!
As a comparison – French, in all its worldliness, is only spoken by 76 million speakers.
So-called “minority” Asian languages are where Asian voice technology companies will be well-poised to surpass the West and increase their market share. Indeed, Asian companies are seeing incredible rates of adoption among the technologies they already offer.
Furthermore, while there is plenty of room for growth within Asia, these large Asian brands will also be well-poised for the African and Latin American markets, which are already familiar with smartphones and other electronic devices by companies like Samsung and Xiaomi.
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Here are some Asian voice technology companies to watch:
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China
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Korea
Naver’s Clova (shared with Line)/Genie
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Japan
Line’s Clova (shared with Naver)
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Are you developing voice technology for the Asian market? Meridian Linguistics specializes in language data collection and analysis for technology companies. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us here.