Voice Search via Personal Assistants will be one of the main topics in 2018, with big internet companies fighting to each other with Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, and probably medium size companies will also launch their own voice assistants.
Why are these news important for online marketing? Voice Search can be a way to bring brands and products to attention when a user is asking a question to a personal assistant. See here the advertising options in voice search or the voice search guidelines by Google.
A personal assistant can be an additional sales channel, but more important is the data consolidated on Amazon or Google that can be used in other verticals, especially on ads with Google, on retail and ads with Amazon, and on entertainment (iTunes) with Apple.
For Marketing, there are two players that matter most when it comes to Ads, Attribution, and Tracking: Amazon and Google. With the personal assistant, Google or Amazon will be present on all consumer devices. The smart speaker at home is the one that consolidates the family, by having multiple voice profiles.
Multiple voice profiles in one device allow to Amazon (via AAP) and Google (via Doubleclick and Adwords) to do more sophisticated attribution and tracking/retargeting (user-centric, family-centric or household-centric).
It will be a question of time to this happens if the massification of the personal assistants follows.