Why Voice Technology Will Change Everything In 2025

President of WillowTree, a TELUS Digital Company, a premier digital experience agency serving the world’s most customer-centric brands.

Remember when every iOS and Android update excited global consumers as much as developers? Each release seemed to launch some new game-changing capability, from GPS and augmented reality to Siri. Those times are back.

Year-end updates, including Apple Intelligence and Google AI, will deliver a world-changing impact, prompting every web and mobile app to undergo a substantial rebuild in 2025 as consumers shift to AI- and voice-first experiences.

However, developing these new app experiences means brands must navigate unfamiliar terrain. Take voice technology, which will fundamentally change how humans interact with devices and machines—if developers get their voice strategy right.

Many product teams will be tempted to focus their voice efforts on Gen-Z, their youngest users. Often regarded as the first digital natives, Gen-Zers talk to voice-powered virtual assistants on their smartphones, smart speakers and wearables as second nature.

PYMNTS’s June 2024 report “How the World Does Digital” supports this perspective. While 17.9% of the total population uses voice for shopping at least once per week, that number jumps to 30.4% for Gen-Z.

But Gen-Z isn’t driving voice technology adoption alone. Voice tech’s momentum started long before their influence took effect. Take Baby Boomers, for example. As the first generation to grow up with the telephone, they developed a preference for phone calls and in-person communication, and voice technology allows them to replicate those modes.

Furthermore, as voice embeds itself into everyday tasks, it creates more inclusive user experiences by removing bottlenecks that have kept many older and neurodivergent users from participating fully in the digital economy. As an added bonus, speaking is three times faster than typing and five times faster than texting.

What The Data Shows

My firm, TELUS Digital, recently surveyed 1,200 people, from ages 18 to 55 and above, on their experience with voice technology (ages 12 to 17 were not surveyed, so we’re not making data-backed claims encompassing all of Gen-Z). Our survey found:

1. Generational gaps in voice usage are becoming the exception, not the rule. Most people, regardless of age, share similar motivations for using voice technology, including speed, convenience and enhanced multitasking.

2. All ages surveyed claimed similar levels of familiarity, comfort and usage of voice technology. However, respondents aged 18 to 24 lagged a bit, with 52% saying they use voice technology daily or weekly, compared to 63% across all ages surveyed.

3. A smaller percentage (67%) of 18-to-24-year-olds use voice assistants like Google Assistant, Siri and Amazon Alexa, versus 80% across all ages surveyed. The younger demographic also talks to their TV remotes less (28% versus 40%).

These numbers need context. Are younger users trending backward in their use of voice? Likely not. A more plausible explanation is that as digital natives, Gen-Z uses voice applications in more task-specific ways than other generations.

Contrast that with older users, who are likely drawn to voice because it’s a more natural interface for them versus typing on a device or manually navigating an app. Advancements like Apple Intelligence will make this even more common as speech recognition and AI automate tasks via voice.

The Loyalty Gap

The greatest generational gap uncovered in our survey centered around loyalty. As natives of digital voice technology, younger users have higher expectations and a greater awareness of alternatives. Nearly 35% of 18-to-24-year-olds ditch their voice-powered app or device when it doesn’t respond accurately.

That percentage drops to 26% when expanded across all ages surveyed. In other words, older users show more loyalty to their voice tools. That’s despite older users being more easily frustrated, as evidenced by their increased likelihood to yell (41% of all ages surveyed vs. 35% of 18-to-24-year-olds) or swear (30% vs. 23%) at their voice-powered apps and devices due to a poor experience.

Counterintuitively, older users forgive their voice apps’ stumbles more than younger users. In that context, older users behave like early adopters, making them an invaluable source of feedback. Brands should remember that as they bring their first versions to market and continue iterating toward more useful and intuitive voice solutions.

Mihai Antonescu, the voice tech veteran who helmed Mercedes-Benz’s “HeyMercedes” in-car voice assistant, captures this reality perfectly: “Early adopters are more tolerant of failure. But they also push the system to try to achieve more and better things” (quote is from my book The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology).

Fact Versus Fiction: Voice Tech Adoption In The Real World

Two realities about voice technology should be clear:

1. Developing voice solutions is complex, requiring rigor, patience and continual user feedback.

2. Predicting which users will most readily adopt a new voice application challenges even the most battle-tested product teams.

Consider the experience of Dr. Yaa Kumah-Crystal, who led the Vanderbilt Electronic Health Record (EHR) Voice Assistant initiative at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, as she shared in my book referenced above.

She hypothesized that younger generations at the hospital—in this case, the nurses—would be more receptive to voice technology compared to the physicians, who had a higher median age.

Instead, she discovered that the older physicians—many of whom already leveraged voice tools like Dragon dictation—were the fastest adopters of the voice initiative. Many younger doctors, used to typing their notes electronically, had a lower adoption rate, as they didn’t view the voice system as a significant efficiency improvement.

The takeaway: Age-based biases about voice technology adoption are often unfounded and can lead to failed products and wasted resources. This holds true for industries beyond healthcare. Take retail and e-commerce, for example, where voice will become the lynchpin of personalized shopping experiences. Or air travel, insurance and legal services, where voice will narrow complicated, time-consuming tasks into short, simple exchanges with the help of conversational AI.

The brands that successfully integrate voice technology will be those that look beyond surface-level indicators like age and instead focus on key fundamentals—identify the routine business processes that need improvement, specify the modes of communication that drive each process, pinpoint the moments of friction and ask how voice can relieve that friction to create an inclusive experience for all users.

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