What Comes Next After Cookies Are Gone?

Google recently announced its plan to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome by 2023. Marketers and advertisers are now starting to wonder whether there will be a replacement that can fill the void left by the “almighty” cookies.

With 50% of all searches online being voice-based in 2020, voice recognition technology might be the answer. Incorporating a range of psychological principles into its AI technology, Bridge’s voiceprint recognition solution known as “MEP”, vows to help marketers better understand consumer behavior in a cookie-less world. 

Bridge, a Taiwan-based martech startup, is now leveraging AI and pioneering Chinese NLP solutions to analyze consumer voice data.

By doing so, they are able to provide actionable insights that marketers can use to appeal to consumers’ extrinsic as well as intrinsic motivations, all while trying to influence their purchasing decisions.

The changing landscape of consumer tracking

Businesses, both small and large, have been on a constant journey of understanding consumer behavior for achieving a myriad of goals.

Starting from designing better products or services to improving sales, understanding consumers’ mindset is a cornerstone to any successful enterprise. 

The advent of the internet has made it simpler to track, analyze, and derive key insights about consumers.

Third-party cookies, as mentioned earlier, are planted across the browsers of internet users to understand their patterns and gain an overview of how they make buying decisions.

However, rampant privacy violations have led to consumers developing a dislike for data collection practices. 

As a result of the criticism against current practices, there is a demand for novel methods to understand consumers in the changing landscape of consumer expectations, privacy requirements, and limitations to tracking cookies.

Bridge’s relevant AI-focused solution

‍The company claims that MEP, its brand-new voiceprint recognition system, only requires a recording of 90 seconds to capture a customer’s profile and show real-time analysis based on the target audience’s characteristics.

“The system could recognize a person’s characteristics, and capture people’s different motives and the kind of information they prefer,” said the company’s CEO and founder Vins Kuo.

While existing voice recognition software provide services such as identity verification and speech analysis, not many work on unearthing the intrinsic motives of customers. “MEP doesn’t just provide demographics or labels. Instead, MEP empowers companies to understand the psychology behind consumer behavior, answering questions such as why a specific customer thinks in that way and how would the same customer react under different situations.” 

The startup’s ultimate goal is to help businesses “hack into a customer’s mind, overlook their decision-making process, predict their behavior, and change their final decision,” Kuo explained.

One thing to be noted is that the technology underpinning Bridge’s services does not store consumers’ personal data. “There’s no need for our system to store voice data, because customer insights would be generated in real-time. After our system analyzes voice data, which only takes a couple of seconds, the voice data could be deleted right away,” Kuo stressed. 

Based on what Bridge claims, here’s what the startup can provide to digital marketers and advertisers: purchase preferences, decision making perspectives, CRM strategy, brand loyalty, and purchase motives, among others. 

Future prospects

Led by a team of experts in a number of fields such as consulting, finance, and computer science, Bridge has already generated revenue and broke even in the first six months after their launch. The startup is currently taking up projects and is also going to soon launch a DaaS software as well.

This article was originally published on SparkAmpLab.com