Mangrove Capital Partners is out this week with its Voice Tech Report for 2019. This annual report covers the growing adoption of voice assistants, and makes an interesting prediction for Siri in 2020.

The report predicts that at WWDC in 2020, Apple will launch a ‘SiriOS’ to further grow the Siri ecosystem. It’s unclear what exactly this means, but it could theoretically open up Siri to move developers and different kinds of applications:

Apple has been less effective at building an ecosystem around voice. With its vision of the ‘Knowledge Navigator’, Apple’s voice strategy was more clearly articulated in 1987 than it is now. The voice community expects Apple to release a SiriOS for its developer community at WWDC 2020 which would accelerate innovation and adoption. “A SiriOS is desirable for enabling innovation and is viewed by many as required to match the progress made by Amazon and Google with their voice assistants,” Bret Kinsella, Editor and Publisher at Voicebot.ai

As for Apple’s Siri efforts in comparison to other voice assistants, Mangrove Capital praises Apple’s recent acquisition of privacy-focused AI startup Silk Labs. It highlights this as a way tech companies are pushing back against the notion that voice assistants lack privacy.

SiriOS could rival something like Amazon’s Alexa Skills platform, which makes it easy for developers to implement Alexa functionality. Apple currently offers SiriKit to developers, but one possibility is that a SiriOS could work across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS with ease.

On an industry-wide basis, Mangrove Capital predicts the by 2025, the “voice economy” will be worth $1 trillion, “surpassing the growth of the mobile app economy.” Specifically, the report highlights the potential of voice shopping, which could grow from $2 billion in 2018 to $40 billion by 2022 as more retailers add support.

Other predictions made in the report:

The death of the keyboard: instead of tapping and typing, we will be speaking and swiping. The keyboard will be largely redundant within 5-10 years

Voice will lead to a whole new product category including screenless smartphones

Brands will soon be instantly recognisable through their ‘sonic identity’ and product search will change forever

There will be a shift of power from software back to hardware because voice is application agnostic

The full Mangrove Capital Partners Voice Tech Report can be read here.

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