Frequently asked questions about the Open Voice Network, its progress, and mission.
Voice as a digital interface and platform promises to make digital connections easier and more inclusive worldwide, to create value for businesses and organizations of all types. Unfortunately, the path to that promise is not assured.
The Open Voice Network (OVN) was formed to enable voice assistance to fulfill its promise.
OVN is a collaborative industry initiative that will develop and propose global industry standards for voice assistance. Such standards will make voice assistance worthy of user trust across multiple platforms, devices, and use cases worldwide, and like other standards-development efforts, substantially accelerate the growth of the available market.
Voice assistance has the potential to become a primary touchless way to connect more quickly and easily with the internet, smart homes and factories, and enterprise applications. For consumer-facing industries, voice assistance could improve productivity, profitability, accessibility, and inclusion. But what started as the world’s fastest adopted consumer technology may fall well short of its potential for acceptance and value. Consumers are showing increased hesitation to venture into new usage, and enterprise decision-makers are concerned about issues of data ownership and use. Research points to a “trust gap” that raises critical questions of privacy, ease of use, dependable connection, equal and unbiased access, and data security.
These concerns extend beyond the handful of organizations dominating the voice assistance landscape today. Leading industry analysts predict that as voice assistance grows in availability and adoption, thousands of innovators and Tier 1 businesses will introduce their own independent and branded assistants by 2025. In such an environment, questions of invocation, interoperability, commercial data ownership, and security become paramount.