Pandora are going to start testing interactive voice ads on their music streaming service later this year.

The future of advertising could see us having a conversation with AIs like Siri as we find out more about products. With the prevalence of smart speakers in homes and assistants on our phones people are finding talking to a machine less threatening all the time, it was only a matter of time before these features were used for marketing.

Pandora are looking to start introducing interactive voice ads as early as this year. Pandora’s vice president of ad product management, Eric Picard says: “Pandora is deeply investing in voice advertising and is driving the market forward by facilitating an ecosystem.”

Picard continues: “Pandora is building a comprehensive voice solution across our consumer-facing offerings with advertising services on top of it to enable our own ‘first party’ offering as well as ‘third-party vendors’ such as Instreamatic and AdsWizz to plug in. Our expectation is that the buy-side are going to want to do ‘build-once-buy-everywhere’ solutions for voice ads just like they have for other markets, and Instreamatic is the first company focused on supporting buy-side voice ads across publishers.”

Instreamatic is a digital audio ad network, that launched five years ago and they’re now working on realising voice-activated ads. They’ve already made deals with companies like Audiomack, Global’s DAX, and Russian radio giant Gazprom-Media Radio.

Pandora is a major western digital service for the company to be working with and could see the proliferation of interactive voice adverts become widespread. Instreamatic’s services work using AI technologies that they say go beyond just ‘yes’ and ‘no’ interaction with full language understanding and machine learning capabilities.

Instreamatic CEO, Stas Tushinskiy said: “The age of voice has arrived, yet there’s remained a stark need for meaningful consumer engagement – and measurable metrics – in the audio ad space. We believe Instreamatic provides the ideal ad platform to serve this marketplace. We’re excited to be engaged with Pandora to bring this AI-enabled technology to its listeners and advertisers, and prepared to scale these new experiences very quickly once deployed.”