Artificial intelligence and machine learning seem to be the things on everybody’s lips at the moment. This can be seen by the importance many brands are placing on implementing AI in some way, shape or form into their business. Despite this, brands, for the most part, have yet to harness the power of voice assistants to offer a more insights into their image, products and services.

Google is one of the leading players in the development of AI, as seen in through its Assistant, and feels that brands need to be doing more to provide a picture of themselves through voice assistants.

“If you search for a brand at the moment, it’s voice in/voice out. As a test, I searched for Adidas this morning and you get the first three lines of Wikipedia – which I imagine isn’t necessarily what a brand wants to sound like when people are searching for that brand,” said Matt Bush, director of agencies at Google UK, speaking at Advertising Week Europe.

“I think there’s definitely some work that needs to be done in terms of trying to understand the sort of questions that are going to be asked around your brand, how you should respond and what kind of information you want to be giving.”

This notion is supported by the case that “when you take your phone in your hand, typing is not the easiest,” according to distinguished engineer at Google Zurich Behshad Behzadi.

He pointed out that typing can sometimes be painful and that there are a lot of scenarios where typing may not be possible. As a result, he believes people are starting to use voice searches and interactions far more.

As voice interactions become start to become the norm, with Gartner predicting that by 2020 people will interact more with their assistants than they do their spouses, brands must start marketing to the machine rather than solely the consumer.

“Brands are already very well versed at marketing to consumer intent, and they’ve been doing that for years. Part of what really needs to change, is getting deeper into that intent. Voice search gives us much more contextual understanding about that intent and the more devices that consumers use to search also gives us intent signals,” said Caroline Reynolds, VP of paid search at iProspect.  

“But, it’s no longer enough just to market to the consumer, this is about starting to market to the machine as well. If you need to market to a digital assistant before you even get to the consumer, that has really strong implications for what brands have to do with their data today.”

But how much attention do brands really have to pay to AI voice assistants and is this something that brands must focus on more-or-less immediately? The Future Laboratory CSO Tracey Follows thinks so.

She said that people are happy to use voice assistance at home – where they can ask what they want away from the public – and, due to this, assistants will become a source of advice for people.

“These devices aren’t just part of the home, they become part of the family. So, it gets to that point where they can advise you, and you’re happy for that to outsource your decisions,” said Follows.

“We’re seeing a lot of brands experiment, and all of that is going into the mainstream now. I think it’s going to happen quite quickly. Voice is an easy and well-tested sense, and I think we’ll find it move very quickly now to the mainstream.”

The first real signs of the potential for brands harnessing the power of virtual assistants to promote and advertise came last week when Google Assistant played an ad for Beauty and the Beast during users’ daily briefings.