Digital Marketing

WHY VOICE SEARCH IS THE FUTURE OF INTERNET

 

If you are internet users (be it the savvy user or just the average social media user), you must have adapted to the introduction of a certain internet update or another. Hence, you must be (or have been) one of the dense populace asking the question “WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET? “.

At the moment, smart home technology seems to be the “thing” (when talking about the internet globally) as the world gradually embraces the Internet of things (IOT) era.

Be that as it may, giant tech companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and the likes are building devices that are intertwined (interconnected) with one another as well as communicate with one another too. Newly-made smart home devices don’t only connect and communicate with one another, they’ve also been built with abilities to talk and interact with their human owners.

As a result, it is not an uncommon scenario these days to see people talking to someone in their home, workplace or phone named Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or google assistant and giving commands as well as questions to the aforementioned names as if they’re communicating with fellow humans.

Although many a person would posit that at the moment, voice recognition and voice commands are still at the elementary stage. However, with artificial intelligence improving and getting more advanced annually, new capabilities and features continue to emerge for voice search and command.

With the steady increase in the development rate of voice search and command, one can only come to a logical conclusion that “THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET CANNOT BE UNCONNECTED TO VOICE SEARCH (AND/ OR COMMAND)”.

We take a look at 3 major reasons why you should join the moving train and embrace voice search and command below:

1. VOICE SEARCH ENABLES YOU TO MULTITASK

One of the greatest benefits of voice search is the fact that it enables you to surf the internet without necessarily having to quit what you’re doing. This is because unlike the regular search mechanism that requires your maximum attention, you can carry out voice search while performing basic day to day activities like driving, watching TV, or even reading (to mention a few).
Little wonder over 52% of people uses voice search while driving per social media today. Even google reported that the top 3 places where voice assistants are used are: the living room (52%), bedroom (25%), and kitchen (22%) (All these are places where we all carry out different activities and need to multitask).

See also  Digital Marketing For Effective Business Growth In Nigeria

2. MORE PEOPLE ARE EMBRACING IT

According to comscore, By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches, Voice commerce sales are also expected to reach $40 billion by 2022, and 30% of web sessions will be done via a screenless-device by 2020 (according to research from Gartner).

The market for voice search just keeps expanding as more and more people embrace it globally, and is expected to grow in value to $15.8 billion in 2021. Even Smart speaker device sales are projected to have reached 36 million units in 2019, up from about 34 million in 2018.

3. VOICE SEARCH HELPS YOU FIND WHAT YOU WANT BETTER

With web search, search engines focus mainly on keywords and leave users to figure out the rest of the information themselves by carefully checking the results one by one. The search engines return results and users go through them one by one until they reach the correct information they are looking for.

This is not the case with voice searches. This is because in voice search, a clear question is expected and a straight answer is provided, as close as possible to the right answer.

Let’s say for instance you queried a text search with the keyword “where do I buy clothes”. You are likely to get a result displaying information about the top cloth retailers and not the closest one to you. If same thing is tried using voice search, the result displays information on the closest retailers to you. Even Searchenginewatch revealed that Voice searches on mobile are 3x more likely to be local-based than text searches.

See also  WHY MOST FACEBOOK ADS FAIL

4. VOICE SEARCH SAVES TIME

When using text search, you will need to scroll through a page to read through results (after clicking). Meanwhile, voice search results are read out to your hearing and so you don’t have to spend those extra seconds (or milliseconds) to scroll up and down. Still not convinced, here’s a stat or two to back the aforementioned statement up:
(I) According to Backlinko, after analyzing 10,000 Google Home search results, it was discovered that it takes an average of 4.6 seconds for a voice search result page to load.
(II) The average voice search result is so short that it contains only 29 words.

5. VOICE SEARCH RESULTS ARE EASY TO UNDERSTAND

While many have come up with the debate that Voice searches could lead to serious havoc if there was an error in communication as a result of accent or no-linguistic related differences, recent research has shown that Voice searches are actually very easy for comprehension. Check out the stats below:

(I) The average voice search result is easy to written in natural language and is easy to understand (typically written at a 9th-grade reading level)  (Backlinko)

(II) 53% of voice-activated speaker owners report it feeling natural to talk to it. (Google)

(III) Mobile voice search on Google is now translated in over 60 languages. (Wikipedia)

I hope you enjoyed this list of voice search statistics.

Now that you’ve gone through this we’d like to hear from you:

What’s your take on voice search?
How often do you use voice search?
Are voice searches useful?

Or perhaps, you have a question or two or contribution to the discussion, you can reach out to us in the comments.