January 2, 2019
Amazon Alexa has had the ability to support good causes for quite some time already. Through voice you can donate to over a 100 charities.
Google just opened up to the same ability on Google Assistant. While I believe this is a great way for good causes to open a low friction channel for collecting funds, I have my doubts on how well this channel works.
I think there is room to create highly produced campaign voice applications at, as it’s currently still easy to be remarkable/stand out and therefore gain attention for your cause. I doubt that there will be a lot of attention for charities that sign up for the service. Also I wonder how memorable the cause is when at some point donating to about any charity will be as easy as just changing a single word in your question. That’s great for the platform, but maybe not so much for the charity.
At least, I’d love to see if people value the frictionless way over donating through something that feels like it had a bit more attention. Donating isn’t just taking the money, people have an emotional connection with the cause they donate to. At least, that’s my assumption.
Source: Digitaltrends: Google Assistant let’s you make donations in a few spoken commands