There are numerous great measurements with respect to digital assistants and voice search. To refer to only a couple:
- More than 25% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile devices (Source: Microsoft)
- 33% of US consumers own a shrewd speaker – Statista
- Use of digital voice assistants to triple to 8 billion by 2023 driven by smart home devices – Juniper Research
- Globally, the transaction value of purchases made via voice assistants on smart home devices is predicted by Statista to reach $164 billion in 2025.
Clearly, this is a growing industry and there is huge scope for consumer engagement and advertising opportunities.
Devices, for example, Google Home, Familiar, and the Amazon Echo range are becoming increasingly prominent in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms in Western countries. Additionally, anthropomorphic assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are included in a wide range of smartphones, cars, and even vacuum cleaners.
It’s a trend that sits at the intersection of increasing mobile usage, sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and the symbiotic relationship between people and technology. Thus, its continued growth seems inexorable.
But what does this mean for brands? Does voice search require a separate strategy? And if so, what does that mean?
This article will review what we know about voice search and give you some tips to help integrate voice into your marketing strategy.
Voice Search: A Characteristic Expansion of Semantic Search
The evolution of communication begins with speech and progresses to written language. However, search engines have proven the opposite.
Clues that we pick up naturally, such as voice or memories of past interactions, are difficult to incorporate into search engines.
At the point when I ask a companion, “What may be the best smartphone for me to buy?”, they can make recommendations in view of my preferences.
Developing this level of insight requires significant natural language processing power, as well as information retrieval technology to search through billions of results and find the right one.
Smartphones provide more relevant information than desktop computers, but a search engine still needs a reliable way to process and use large amounts of data.
This matters when we consider a voice search strategy. People adapt their behaviour based on the possibilities available to them. As marketers, understanding these behaviours is important if we want to cut through the noise and connect.
Brands create content that takes the consumer from question to answer. The search engine is the interlocutor that makes the association.
Google’s Hummingbird algorithm ushered in the era of semantic search. It utilized the Google Knowledge Graph to understand relationships between entities and provide something approaching conversational search.
Ask Google “Who is the King of Spain?”, and it will answer “King Felipe VI”. Next, ask “Who is his wife?”, also, it will reply “Letizia of Spain”.
Google has guessed that ‘it’ refers to King Philip. This is a subtle but significant change that affects how we should create and promote content through search. Now we can communicate through search engine optimization (SEO) instead of a one-way exchange.
Semantic search is changing how people search for information and it’s increasing their expectations. As search engine capabilities change, so must we as marketers.
In essence, this development is a natural and important component of the rise of voice search. Google reports that people are searching for queries faster using words like ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘I’.
As an indication of modern consumer demands from online content, this is very clear. Individuals will possibly pose these inquiries assuming they anticipate that the response should be personalized and unique to them. These searches are usually done by voice rather than text.
Once more, this focuses on the distinction between voice search and traditional search. Consumers are treating digital assistants the same way, a personal helper to get things done faster and easier than ever before. We expect assistants to ‘know’ us.
Another question that is often raised is how real is the business opportunity for voice search.
A 2017 study by iProspect found that while people primarily use voice search to get information, such as the weather forecast, or to enable tasks such as turning on lights and playing music, They are likewise utilizing them to track down stores, research and shop.
Moreover, the difference between voice search on a mobile and a smart home device is significant. This is perhaps to be expected, given that we carry mobile devices with us and have screens, while home devices do not, but it carries important implications for brands. Mobile phone screens provide a canvas on which to display choices and information, while a home device must provide an authentic response.
And the e-commerce sector is taking note, with Walmart acquiring conversational AI-startup Botmock, and partnering with Google to allow customers to add items to their virtual shopping carts via Google Assistant. can go. Target and Carrefour also have similar deals with Google, and Ocado has teamed up with Amazon to create a similar experience through Alexa.
From this, we can begin to understand the drivers – both technical and human – that have seen voice search grow so rapidly.
Want to know how Voice Search can affect your business? Contact us at support@sunnydayconsulting.com or check our website at www.sunnydayconsulting.com!
