"Hey Alexa, play me Crown Hit." That's how access to music works today. When did you last switch on a radio at home? Or do you just tell your smart speaker, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Nest, what music or radio station you're in the mood for? Then you are in good company: 320 million such networked speakers with integrated voice assistants have been in use worldwide since 2020, according to Statista. They offer exciting new possibilities - for listeners, radio stations, advertisers and anyone who produces a podcast, including "Die Presse".

What we Googled yesterday, we already ask Siri today. Voice assistants are so easy to control that they are spreading inexorably. Instead of awkwardly navigating through the menus of computers and smartphones with a mouse or finger, we simply say an activation word or ask a question, and the helpful voice assistant gives us weather data, sends messages to our friends or tells us in which nearby shop we can find the shoes we are looking for.

Completely new listening experiences are thus possible, with voice assistance as the means to find them. Consumers have quickly realised that they can access their podcasts with such devices, from home and on the go, whether in the car or on their mobile phone. Good old radio has fuelled this development: live radio accounts for two-thirds of smart speaker usage time. This puts it ahead of music streaming services like Spotify.

The trend continues: according to a survey by the auditing firm PwC, in the US more than three quarters of 25- to 49-year-olds talk to their voice-controlled devices at least once a day. Whether listening to music, buying a product or answering a question: Voice assistants already play an important role in many aspects of digital life. With the spread of connected household devices such as vacuum robots or infotainment systems in cars, this will only increase. According to a Statista study, more than 8.4 billion digital voice assistants will be in use by 2024 - more than the number of people living on earth. But this is not all good news for radio listeners and media diversity.

When I search for something on Google and Amazon, I get pages and pages of results, just like with Netflix, the EPG on the TV or the classic TV guide. Facebook and Instagram also allow their users to search for content through their text-based search engines. With smart speakers, I always expect (and get) exactly ONE answer to ONE question. That may be practical, but it is a massive loss of diversity.

This approach turns the voice assistant platform into a de facto gatekeeper where only the positioning in the results decides on findability and accessibility. We therefore don't even have to demonstrate whether the platforms are ill-intentioned - what matters is how well consumers are served, and whether citizens’ rights, in particular the right to media diversity, are properly upheld.

So we will have many voice assistants that, by definition, each give us one answer. This will increase our dependence. That can become worrying: We see in other digital markets that tech corporations can use such dependency to their own advantage. The more smart speakers are in use, the higher the likelihood that the tech providers behind them want to profit directly from the usage. They might be tempted to give users preference to their own offerings or even replace them with their own radio shows and podcasts. In a recent UK survey, 45% of smart speaker users said their device could not understand a question about specific radio stations.

The impact on advertising and online commerce could be drastic. Tech platforms could replace ads on radio shows or podcasts with ads they sell themselves. Other providers would be denied access to such usage data. Less drastically, but still very concerning, Big Tech companies could draw on their already huge pool of data from other services to favour their own services. This would make it harder for radio operators, for example, to compete fairly.

Voice assistants are thus powerful gatekeepers in our future world via smart speakers and in the connected car. To preserve our diverse media landscape, we must not let them determine how listeners can find us. We need a legal framework that creates a level playing field for providers and gatekeepers. The need for this is also shown by the European Commission's recently published preliminary survey report on the "Internet of Things" sector inquiry. The report confirms that voice assistants play a "central role" in the interconnection of various digital devices and services, while emphasising that this "creates opportunities for certain distortive behaviours".

These findings make it clear that EU lawmakers must act decisively to ensure that providers are able to continue to offer their listeners locally created programmes that they can access on the device of their choice, because: Listeners have the right to diversity and to universal and unfettered access to local content.

Good legislation promotes healthy competition on an equal footing with tech corporations, laying the foundation for more innovation, consumer choice and media diversity in the long run. The Digital Markets Act (DMA) currently under discussion in Brussels provides the right legal framework for this – but a clarification to the DMA is required, in order to confirm that voice assistant platforms are core platform services that fall within the scope of this text. Just as for online marketplaces or search engines, clear rules must also apply to voice assistants. This includes that here, too, search results must be presented impartially and users must have unfettered access to the content of their choice.

The DMA is a historic opportunity to address the growing challenges that voice assistance platforms pose to us all: to develop a legal framework that ensures that our media remain diverse and freely accessible in the age of smart assistants.

Veit Dengler, Bauer Media COO