The Growing Acceptability of Voice Search & It?s Future Trends

Posted by CBNITS on February 15th, 2019

With the emergence of personal assistant devices and voice-controlled WiFi speakers such as Amazon Alexa, Siri, Google Home, voice search is witnessing an unprecedented growth over the last couple of years. Voice search allows users to search by using their voice. So, instead of typing into a search field, people use their voice. Speech recognition technology entered the public consciousness rather recently, and we often wonder why the popular technology companies are only bringing these services to us now.

But the truth is voice search technology has been developed on for decades, and, when Big Data, IoT, Deep Learning, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence make their way more and more into the forefront of technology, voice search technology has been redefined.

Voice search is actually a speech recognition technology that allows users to search by saying terms aloud rather than typing them into a search field. Voice search allows spoken input into systems. You talk to your computer, phone or device and it uses what you said as input to trigger some action. The technology is being used to replace other methods of input like typing, clicking or selecting in other ways.

How Does It Work?

Microphone translates the vibrations of a person’s voice into a digital signal. It is the digital signal that a speech recognition program analyzes in order to recognize separate phonemes, the basic building blocks of speech. While many speech recognition systems only support English, some speech recognition software supports multiple languages. This requires a unique dictionary for each language and extra algorithms to understand and process different accents. Voice search works on the following pattern.

Breaking down the audio of a speech recording into individual sounds

analyzing each sound

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Using algorithms to find the most probable word fit in that language

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Transcribing those sounds into text

Predictions on the Voice Search Trends -

35.6 million Americans used a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month in 2017 according to eMarketer. Econsultancy.com published “By 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen.” Or, “By 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice.” Now, the smart speaker market is a veritable battlefield of the tech giants, with Apple, Baidu, Facebook, Samsung and Microsoft all in the process of either launching or developing their own smart speakers with voice-controlled assistants.

Final Thoughts-

The popularity of voice search assistants is growing at a rapid pace. As traditional search is breaking down as more and more voice search options get their footings. In  2019, voice  search will play a significant role.