How Often Do You Use Vocal Search
February 8, 2016
Vocal search is an idea from the future: you give a computer a query and it returns relevant information. However, vocal search has become an actual “thing” with mobile assistants like Siri, Cortana, and build in NLP engines on newer technology. I enjoy using vocal search because it saves me from having to type my query on a tiny keyboard, but when I’m in a public place I don’t use it for privacy reasons. Search Engine Watch asks the question, “What Do You Need To Know About Voice Search?” and provides answers for me more questions about vocal search.
Northstar Research conducted a study that discovered 55% percent of US teens used vocal search, while only 41% of US adults do. An even funnier fact is that 56% of US adults only use the search function, because it makes them feel tech-savvy.
Vocal Search is extremely popular in Asia due to the different alphabets. Asian languages are harder to type on a smaller keyboard. It is also a pain on Roman alphabet keyboards!
Tech companies are currently working on new innovations with vocal search. The article highlights how Google is trying to understand the semantic context behind queries for intent and accuracy.
“Superlatives, ordered items, points in time and complex combinations can now be understood to serve you more relevant answers to your questions…These ‘direct answers’ provided by Google will theoretically better match the more natural way that people ask questions in speech rather then when typing something into a search bar, where keywords can still dominate our search behaviour.”
It translates to a quicker way to access information and answer common questions without having to type on a keyboard. Now it would be a lot easier if you did not have to press a button to activate the vocal search.
Whitney Grace, February 8, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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