Beware: Voice Search Isn’t That Exciting

Everyone's yelling about voice search. At tech and marketing conferences you can't sneeze without infecting someone saying "By 2020, 50+% Of All Searches Will Be By Voice."

It's an exciting statement that makes very little sense.

I'd like to see a sobriety test for whoever started this. More important, I'd like a look at the data behind the claim, and what folks mean when they breathlessly say "voice search."

To me, a genuine voice search:

1. Takes my spoken query
2. Returns a spoken query result 

I suspect that the 50% statistic includes searches where:

1. I use my voice to query
2. I get a screen query result

That's not a significant step in search technology. Nor does it impact marketing strategy.

Once you nail voice recognition, voice query is straightforward: You pass the spoken query to the search engine as text. The search engine returns a standard result. That's impressive, but it doesn't change marketers' need to grab real estate in a visual query result.

Voice Search Is Great For Single Response Queries

Voice-search-to-voice-response is excellent for single-response queries: Queries where a single result will satisfy the user's question. For example: 

“What’s the most common element in the Earth’s Atmosphere?” 

The result shows a single answer at the top of the page in Google's "Answer Box." Hopefully, there's only one answer:

This is a perfect query for voice response. Google Home and Alexa will respond with something like "The atmosphere is composed of ~78% nitrogen."

“What is the temperature outside?”

Unless you live in New Jersey, the temperature should stay the same for the next few minutes:

Again, a perfect candidate for voice response. A voice device would respond with some version of "It is 70 degrees Fahrenheit."

Voice Search Fails At Decision Support

However, voice-search-to-voice-response won’t work for decision support: Open-ended queries where we want Google to help us make a decision. The query result in these cases can be ambiguous and requires that we review it. For example:

“What’s the best Netflix series to binge-watch?” 

Search engines can't interpret "best." So they won’t be able to provide a great answer to this kind of question anytime soon. I’m a science fiction fan, so my idea of “best” may be very different from my daughter’s. She likes horror movies. So the search engine will return a list of “best” possible answers, instead:

That's a lousy voice response candidate. My voice device will say something like "Here is a list of results for..." and then start spewing article titles.

Cooking doesn't work out well, either:

How do I make toast?

There are lots of ways to make toast, too. Right now, if I ask Google Home how to cook toast, I get one answer that gives me blackened, cracker-like results. That’s less than ideal. What if I want avocado toast? Or cinnamon toast? I need to review the list of results:

 Yes, there's an Answer Box. But even the answer box has multiple options. Voice response isn't enough.

User Experience, Not Attention Bait

This is all about user experience versus attention-grabbing factoids. Voice response for multiple-option query results is awful user experience.

There’s no voice replacement for a decision support page. Google Home or Alexa could speak a list of results, letting us say something like “that one” when we hear a result we like.

That’s the best user experience 1985 had to offer: We used to call 411, ask a question, and have an operator give us a list of possibilities over the phone while we frantically scribbled them down.

I didn’t buy a Google Home so that I could brush up on my shorthand skills.

My Point

Don’t base your marketing strategy on the idea that, two years from now, no one will find your products and services using a browser. If you do, your marketing - particularly your search marketing - will suffer. 

We’re visual creatures: When we have choices, we want to see them.

Do what you're supposed to be doing anyway: Work on structuring your data and providing clear answers that a search engine can parse and return as an answer box result. Provide answers to questions your audience asks. And make sure you're part of browser-based decision support results. 

Focus on the fundamentals, and pause before you feed your marketing plan into the voice search hype machine.