Although Zooey Deschanel’s cringeworthy Siri commercial may have inspired a lot of parodies, Apple’s voice-activated search tool has received plenty of traction in the mobile market. And with new voice-upgrades and a translucent iOS7 overlay announced recently, there’s clearly a push to make it an integral part of the search process – and since it uses Bing as its default engine, Google is unsurprisingly coming out with a rival.
Nicknamed ‘OK Google’, the voice search has been added to the Google Now app for iOS and Android, as well as being accessible directly through Chrome. One of the most significant ways Google’s voice-tool has an advantage is its reliance on ‘cards’ of semantically organised data, as with the Knowledge Graph, allowing the search engine to not only recognise the search query but also to deliver a highly targeted answer. These cards range from birthday data, to flight details, to event tickets, allowing users to keep on top of their activity – even by transferring information taken from desktop searches from a logged-in Google account. The use of semantic tools means it understands the use of ambiguous pronouns (like ‘him’) or adverbs (like ‘here’), based on search history and geographical location.
However, “conversational search” is still in its infancy, with the vast majority of users keen to simply type out their answers to avoid any ambiguities. MEC wouldn’t expect there to be a colossal sea change in search behaviour for a while, but once the technology is ready, the conventional typed query may undergo a colossal change. Ensuring a website implements as much semantic data as possible and ranks more grammatically complete queries for longer, is likely to be a priority in the next few years.