Like any product introduced to the market, voice assistants are never one and done. They require monitoring and iterations based on user experiences to continuously improve. If your users are constantly frustrated by false positives, lack of accurate responses, or unresponsiveness to certain questions, they will likely abandon your voice assistant and possibly your brand. 

The very nature of voice assistants allows humans to connect on a more personal level with the world around them—by talking to devices and brands as they would other people. Personalized experiences are a natural extension of these relationships. 

While people are willing to have certain data collected, if it means a better experience, they’re unlikely to want to share their usage details with a third party. A study from Smart Communications revealed that 61% of consumers will share personal data in order to receive personalized marketing communications. Trust is a key factor in customer relationships, without it brands are unlikely to create brand evangelism and loyalty.

Without knowledge of how customers are using your voice assistant, how the voice AI is performing, what your customers are asking for, and the ability to personalize experiences, brands miss out on opportunities to address customer expectations and desires. On the other hand, a wholly-owned voice assistant can literally be your voice of the customer—accurately reporting user experiences and informing the company and product roadmaps while building a loyal customer base and attracting new customers.

Creating future competitors

If you partner with a company that creates and sells its own products in a variety of consumer markets, you may want to think twice before partnering with them. While it may be enticing to have a voice assistant at little to no upfront cost, the risk of creating a competitor far outweighs any potential benefits. They won’t be any average competitor either. They’ll be a competitor with access to all of your data, information, and sales history. 

Since the third-party platform controls all the data and knows how the voice assistant is being used, they have all the information they need to create a superior version of your device with their own brand. They may even release it at a cheaper price point to further undercut your device.

With access to your data, your partner will be able to see and analyze an immense amount of information, including: 

• Trends and popular use cases
• Requests that users are asking that aren’t being fulfilled
• Functions not available on your device
• How users like to use your product
• Who is using it (age, gender, ethnicity, location)
• Predictions based on usage of what types of functions users might want to see

Essentially, your voice assistant becomes their focus group to study product usage and trends. By studying your data, they’ll compose a very clear picture of who your users are, how they’re using the device, and what they want. Then, they’ll have everything they need to create their own version of your product with all the functionality that yours is missing, and with new, popular use cases and domains—possibly at a lower price point. 

By partnering with such a company, you’re essentially giving a potential competitor all the ingredients of your secret recipe to make their own, superior version. During the partnership, you won’t have access to the user data that could inform your own product improvements. 

Once your voice partner releases their version of your product at a lower price point, you’ll lose users and see a decrease in future sales. What began as a piece of advanced, cutting-edge technology will lose competitiveness and relevance. Before choosing to partner with a third-party platform, you need to consider if the risk of creating a future competitor is really worth it. 

The importance of brand ownership

According to Forbes, presenting a brand consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%, making branding a vital part of proving ROI on your voice AI investment. Even if the third-party platform is free or low-cost to partner with, it will pay off in the long run to have your own branding. 

Most companies commit considerable resources to branding efforts that effectively communicate their values, personality, and market position to customers and prospects. Over time, people begin to recognize the company by the look of its logo and colors and a variety of sounds associated with sonic branding—including jingles, product sounds, and the voice of its assistant.

However, when you partner with a third-party provider, customers do not interact with your brand. Instead, they repeatedly say the name of the third-party voice assistant. Even if the product is yours, such as a car or TV, your customers will be making connections with the third party—instead of your brand. A great example of this is a recent Buick commercial, where the Buick brand becomes subordinate to the name of the third-party voice assistant, encouraging potential customers to forget they are driving a Buick.

According to Pam Moore Marketing, on average it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember your brand, showing that having repeated connections across many channels will give the best results. When your customers are repeating the name of another company over and over, those connections are no longer yours.

While the product or engineering teams may be making the decisions about whether to build, buy, or partner for voice assistant solutions, their considerations must stretch beyond the ease, immediacy, and low cost of third-party voice solutions. When long-term product viability and customer relationships are at risk, it’s essential to consider the branding implications as an integral part of the voice AI decision-making process. 

Trust and customer privacy

Trust and fears over data privacy are key factors for consumers who have not yet adopted voice assistants or use them only for playing music and setting timers. According to a study by Microsoft, 41% of users report concerns around trust, privacy, and passive listening. Practices of early days of voice assistants have created fear amongst consumers. The only way to alleviate those fears is to create trust and give users the option to opt-in or out of personalization features. 

When partnering with a third-party platform, you have to accept whatever privacy controls and options they’ve adopted, which may not always be what is best for your users. It’s important to give your users a choice on whether they wish to opt-in or out of data collection, and the third party may or may not give them this decision. If the third party that you partner with has privacy issues, your users will begin to link your brand to privacy issues as well, creating a lack of trust and loyalty. 

According to Salesforce, 3 in 5 customers feel they’ve lost control over how their personal information is used, which is why giving users the option to opt-in or out is so important. Users are also more likely to opt-in to data collection if the company is well trusted and transparent about how they’re using the data.