Is 2017 the year of Voice Search?
Helen Payne
This article was inspired by a recent visit from Amazon to the MEC Manchester office.
For most of us our voice search history is likely to be a clunky experience of shouting ‘ok Google’ or screaming expletives at Siri as they both fail demonstrably to understand a simple request. Beyond frustration and procrastination it seems that voice search will now start to become much more useful and ubiquitous within our homes as the number of voice search enabled gadgets and apps (skills in the case of Amazon Echo) increase and become more accessible.
The main players of voice search are Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana but only Amazon and Google have launched in-home assistants. The Amazon Echo assistant is already present in 4% of US homes after launching 18 months ago and sales spiked to a 400% increase y-o-y at Christmas. Can we expect to see the same sharp uptake in the UK? The tech is available and audience inclination is holding as Google cite 20% of queries on an Android device through the Google app are now voice searches. This trajectory of interest is set to turn into everyday behaviour as adoption rates rise, unsurprisingly driven by younger audiences of teens and millennials.
So, the questions for marketers are: Can we optimize to create preferential positioning for our clients? And is it better to be the voice search magpie hoping for first-mover advantage, gravitating towards the latest piece of consumer tech or better to bide our time and learn from others’ mistakes? The answer is always the same; we listen to our audiences!
A good understanding of audience behaviour; grasping their aspirations, motivations, device usage and means; along with the way they navigate the category will shine a light on how we should prioritise a voice search strategy. Once these details are found it’s possible to answer the important questions of ‘will the audience use voice search?’ and ‘will voice search work in the category?’, therefore predicting audience behavior and buy-in of a voice search strategy.
Trying not to state the obvious but voice search is different. The main reason for any search activity is to find an answer to a question but when the answer to the question relies on an algorithm to filter the results and only deliver one back to you then it’s probably best to stick to asking simple questions. Voice search is more likely to find its place where audiences are specifically interested in the details of a product or service, whether that’s searching for a local takeaway or accessing particular details of an insurance policy. And it’s harder to see a place for it in emotive searches or those which require aesthetic analysis.
The opportunities spread beyond our homes and phones, Apples CarPlay integrates phones into cars to allow voice search for media, directions and communicating with friends and family. It was recently announced at CES that Ford will incorporate Amazon’s Alexa into their models in 2020, whilst Mercedes Benz plan to tie in with Google Home’s assistant. So now we’re not just ‘Always on’ with regards to absorbing messages but we’re ‘Always on Search’ too.
‘OK Google- where did I park my car?!’