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Blog posted by: Sam Dub and Mark Hurrell, 23 August 2018 – Categories: Digital, Digital strategy, GOV.UK.

Over the past few years, more and more people have been adding voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant to their homes and using them on their smartphones.

The most popular way to use these assistants is to ask questions - and we know users often expect to find answers from government. So we decided to put together a small team to look at how to meet this emerging need on GOV.UK.

Why voice assistants matter for GOV.UK

Smart speaker ownership is growing rapidly in the UK - 8% of adults now own one, up 3% in 2018 so far.

In 2016 Google reported 20% of searches on Android devices were voice searches. Market analyst ComScore predicts that half of all search queries will be spoken by 2020.

The leading voice platforms do not share data on user’s specific queries, but conversations we’ve had with teams at Amazon and Google made it clear that many users are asking questions where government is the best source.

Voice interfaces are nothing new for many people with access needs, who might use software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. But there's much excitement in the accessibility community about voice assistants. Their dramatically simpler interface has the potential to help lots of people who find computers and phones hard to use right now.

For GOV.UK, working on voice is an opportunity to meet the rising expectations of users and make government more accessible.

Tackling voice at scale

As government we need to approach voice services in a consistent way.

The recent GDS Innovation Survey has shown many local authorities, agencies and government departments are already exploring how to they can use voice to deliver information and services.

So in keeping with government’s design principles GOV.UK’s approach to this needs to be:

• cross-platform
• cross-government
• consistent
• scalable

Our team had experience creating apps and skills for voice assistants, but we wanted to find out if it was possible to support all the major voice platforms without having to build apps for each one.

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