Residents Are Turning to Digital Assistants For Recycling information

Let’s face it, technology moves fast. Today, there are more ways for residents to navigate the complicated world of recycling than ever before. From print, to web, to mobile, in the past it was easy to ensure that the information residents received about waste and recycling was coming directly from you.

However, there’s now an explosive growth of chatbots and digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Home.

As a result, your residents are increasingly turning to a technology that you do not have a presence on for answers to their common waste and recycling questions.

Take the following scenario for example, which is becoming increasingly common in households across North America. A resident in their kitchen baking a pie. After using all the eggs, they wanted to find out what to do with the empty foam egg carton now sitting on their counter. With pie dough covered hands, they’re probably not going to go to their local waste department website, but instead might simply say “OK Google, ask Recycle Coach if I can recycle this foam egg carton?” Like magic, their Google Assistant springs to life, calls the Recycle Coach Action, and answers their question with contextual and local information taken directly from your program!

Thinking that this sounds a bit far-fetched? Consider these numbers that show that digital assitants are not just the latest flash-in-the-pan trend:

• The digital assistant market is on track to “exceed 4 billion consumer devices by the end of 2017…and grow to more than 7 billion by 2020” according to business information provider IHS Markit
• Amazingly, ComScore estimates that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020

• “40% of adults now use voice search once per day” according to Location World

• “65% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine to going back to the days before they had a smart speaker” via com

• Baby Boomers are responsible 31% percent of all Amazon Echo purchases, which is used to access Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa according to Slice Intelligence

Given their considerable ease of use, more residents are now turning to digital assistants and voice search to quickly check if something is recyclable, which is a huge opportunity for municipalities to make their information easily accessible to this growing segment.

With Recycle Coach, you can join a network of over 3,000+ municipalities that are staying ahead of technology by integrating their program information and making it available to residents via the most robust communications platform in the business. Contact us today and we’ll be happy to show you how to futureproof your program!

Recycle Coach also provides a Facebook messenger chatbot, a platform that 1.2 billion people already use every month. Residents simply go to Recycle Coach’s Facebook page and send a message to initiate the conversation. Instant answers are provided. Contact us to find out how to customize the chatbot and digital search results for your municipality now.