Just a few years ago, building a voice application seemed to be all the rage.

Applications like Dragon Dictation seemed to be all the rage, and the concept that people could dictate their words into complete sentences captured the imagination of tech-heads all over the world. Since then, voice applications have become somewhat arbitrary. With smart home applications like Siri, Google Home and Alexa dominating the voice application airwaves, you’d be forgiven in thinking that building voice applications is a lost cause.

It turns out the opposite is true.

Though we don’t see voice command applications coming on the market any time soon to outbid the likes of Alexa and Google Home, soon all applications will demand some degree of vocal technology to stay ahead of the curb.

Though we currently have voice applications dominating maps, song choices and so on, the likelihood that we will be able to demand our smart home hubs to help us buy airplane tickets, dinner and even organise our birthdays creates a future demand that well exceeds current supply.

So the question now remains, what does it take to build a voice application?

It’s not hard to get Siri to say stuff. Writing a simple application with a dictation function is quite easy to do. The hard part in creating a voice application is in integrating directly with voice commands in iOS, Android, and generating a meaningful throughput. The best place to start is VoiceXML, which is the international standard for building voice to computer interfaces.

Smart home applications are starting to appear on the market, and will look to take over the company as a whole by 2020. In fact, by 2023 the smart home market will set to be worth $137.91B USD, increasing by almost 20% a year thereafter.

In the not-too distant future, integration with smart home technology will become one of the biggest markets on earth.