Cortana, Google Assistant and Alexa are favorites of the enterprise in new Conversational Economy

While most consumer surveys show Google Assistant and Amazon's Alexa as the top two voice-activated personal assistants, it appears that users in the enterprise are also enamored by Microsoft's Cortana. Pindrop polled businesses and found that globally, only 28% use voice technology as a tool for customers to communicate with them. In the states, that figure is 38%. World-wide, 67% of these businesses said that they plan to use voice-activated assistants for interactions with customers within the next five years. In the U.S., 82% of the firms surveyed say that they will be using voice to interact with consumers over the next half-decade.

Pindrop's survey shows that 78% of businesses plan on spending money over the next two years to build a Cortana-driven system for interacting with customers. This matches the 78% that plan on making a similar two-year investment in Google Assistant, and is close to the 77% of businesses that plan on spending money for a system powered by Amazon's Alexa. IBM's Watson is next (69%), followed by Apple's Siri (68%) and Samsung's Bixby (62%).

The use of virtual personal assistants in customer interactions is something that will help improve customer satisfactions scores, according to 94% of managers. 88% say that using such a system gives their company a moderate or strong competitive advantage.

While the enterprise is excited over the use of what is being called the "Conversational Economy," there are some consumer fears that need to be overcome. 85% of businesses surveyed say that the widespread introduction of this technology will be held back by consumers worrying about the misuse of their data. 82% of these businesses say that consumers will be worried about fraud.

source: Pindrop