Phones are becoming smarter and becoming the hub of life. The challenge is typing on a small keyboard, it is not comfortable or convenient.
Why not make it easier by using virtual assistants to obtain information through voice? Since October 2014, the 41% of adults and 55% of teenagers use Siri, Google Now or Cortana at least once a day.
Many Top Tech companies are spending a lot of money and manpower to make it convenient for people to control their devices using voice commands.
In some ways, Amazon may be off to a good start with a device called The Amazon Echo, also known as Alexa. It's always on and listening; to the user's voice command, providing answers to questions and information from the Web, and can perform tasks such as changing the status on smart devices such as smart lights or playing music.
Alexa has a component with a “wide speech recognition field”, so it can recognize a voice from across a room. Although I don't use this device, I have heard good reviews from users. Amazon also the Fire TV stick with remote voice control that you can talk to instead of pressing a button to watch your favorite television program.
Current Market: Search, Learn, Anticipate and Predict
Google's approach to voice technology is a little different. Instead of a reactive approach to a user's voice commands, Google is using the knowledge it has to anticipate and learn user needs.
For example, Google, through the application Google Now, will give you information about traffic around the time you are going to start your trip. You can choose and personalize the cards you use and receive reminders about bills to pay, flight information and weather conditions, learning from your email and using it to anticipate what kind of information you may need.
For Google Now, the wake-up phrase is “OK, Google.” I recently tried the query “drive time from Atlanta to Ashland Alabama,” and Google Now told me the driving time was one hour and 47 minutes and offered to give me directions. This is very useful if you are in the car and want to get some information quickly without using your hands.
Google Now is integrated into the Nexus devices. If you want to use it on Android or a desktop PC, use the Google Now App or the Google Chrome browser. If you choose to submit your activity and be tracked, you will be able to obtain timely information about what is convenient and necessary to do.
Waze, a Google-owned navigation app, recognizes patterns and predicts where you're going based on the time of day. Google Now gives you traffic alerts when you normally leave for work or home.
Apple has Siri, and Microsoft Cortana. Both have gained a lot of publicity for the way they answer questions and provide information through user voice commands. In Windows 10, Microsoft has built Cortana into the desktop; You can choose a simple search bar and choose to type or use your voice to search.
Overcoming Technology Challenges
The advancement of voice-based queries uses a combination of several technologies, such as natural language processing (NLP) and text-to-speech (TTS). For more accurate results when using the search by voice command, users must use pre-programmed voice search tools to make requests. Local phrases (slang), accents and speech patterns vary widely and present a challenge.
The accuracy of speech recognition and natural language processing will undoubtedly improve. As an example of how things are developing rapidly, Google Research announced in September 2015 “Even the best acoustic neural network models use Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and sequence of discriminative training techniques. These models are a special extension of recurrent neural networks (ANNs) that are more accurate, especially in noisy environments, and are incredibly fast!”
Impact on the Presence of your Website
At this time, it appears that websites do not require any special coding to appear on the surface of voice search results. Follow all best practices and update regularly to keep your website optimized for search by voice command.
As soon as you finish reading this article, Be sure to use your favorite virtual assistant – Siri, Google Now, Cortana or Alexa – and search for yourself or the name of your company and see if the results are different from the typed organic search. During the search for my name, my LinkedIn profile came up as the first Cortana result, while Google Now had difficulty with my last name. When it did, it showed me my LinkedIn profile as the first result.
These are some changes you can expect in the future while voice-based search increases.
- It will be a more colloquial way of searching.
- They will provide direct answers in the content, almost in a natural way.
- There will be a need to optimize longer long tail words.
- More emphasis on sentences or phrases and less on keywords.
- Tagging and semantic search will play a larger role.
- Google and other voice applications can provide data and statistics about search queries and results.
- If there is a move towards special labels or voice dialing, they will involve learning and application.
- An increased need for optimized images and videos.
Where the Voice Command Search Goes
While everyone agreed that voice search isn't quite there yet, it is something that is growing and can play an important role in the future of search – mainly that voice search will be integrated into more of our lives. beyond just phones. Here's what's likely in the future:
- Greater prevalence (especially with the evolution of wearable technology).
- Behavior and pattern recognition.
- SERP Evolution.
- More applications using voice.
- Language and accent recognition.
What has been your experience as a user of these virtual assistants? Do you think we're ready for more search by voice command?
Source: Search Engine Land