Voice is the new search

Technology keeps on surprising us with its fast and exponential growth, which represents a serious challenge for businesses to adapt and chase its rapid evolution. If you’re not first, you’re last, as a business, you need to always monitor what’s going on in your industry, and try to be ahead of the competition. So many things are happening, but in this article, I want to draw your attention to the rise of voice-enabled tech. Voice-enabled tech is creating a new communication channel for firms and customers. The client is having more personal experience speaking to, instead of typing on a computer, and receiving quick, smart responses.

How does search engine work?

The typical search engine that we know is based on text, its objective is to present a relevant set of high-quality search results that will fulfill the user’s query/question (which is text) as quickly as possible.

In general, all search engines perform 3 major tasks :

1- Crawling:

Search engines examine content they learn about, they “crawl” the internet to discover new content (web pages, images, videos). Each search engine uses “bots” (short for robots) to make their way through the pages, these bots jump from page to page by following links to other pages, THEY NEVER STOP, their purpose is to visit and revisit pages looking for new links and new content to add in the index.

2- Indexing:

Classifies each piece of content, the index is an enormous list of all the web pages and content found by the bots. But hey !! not everything the bots find makes it into the index, for instance, repeated copies of information (same content).

3- Ranking:

Which content is most useful to searchers? there are many ways search engines rank, including things like the keywords on the page, the number of other websites linking to it and the freshness of the content.

How does voice search work?

At the core of voice search is speech recognition technology, this technology goes all the way back to 1960, but it took some time to grow and become this system that understands word meanings based on history, context, and tonality.

Voice search combines speech recognition with search queries, so instead of typing, the user asks questions out loud to the machine that analyzes what it’s hearing, processes it to the search engine, and presents relevant results.

Voice search is gaining popularity quickly, the main factors behind this are:

• Speed, speaking is faster than typing, you can speak 110–150 words per minute, as opposed to the average person’s typing rate of 38–40 words per minute (Bing).
• Convenient to mobile users, with the heavy use of mobile, it’s more suitable to say your requests than typing them into the device.
• The rise of virtual assistants, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana, these tools that are also based on speech recognition, make voice search a more natural practice.

Voice search vs text search

It’s obvious that voice search will gain more popularity with time and will eventually take over text search. Here are some statistics that manifest that idea:

• Roughly 40 % of all internet users in the US and a third of its total population are users of voice search (eMarketer, 2019)
• 75% of US households will have at least one smart speaker by 2020 ( Microsoft), more and more people are expected to purchase smart speakers.
• 52% of all smart speaker owners report using their device daily (NPR)
• A quarter of a trillion voice searches were carried out in 2018 (Voicebot)

“Your brand needs to have its own agents that can talk directly to customers and to converse across multiple digital assistants” –Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

To conclude, if you want to get ahead of the competition, you should start embracing voice as a communication channel and integrate it into your growth strategy. Voice era is upon us, and you should prepare for it.

I would love to get your feedback about the article, give it a clap if you liked it, and comment if you have any opinion about the topic 😊

About this article

This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Business Strategy. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DBS.