We recently heard that about 30 per cent of searches will be done without a screen by 2021. So, we dove further into the proliferation of the smart speaker and the importance of voice search to see where things may be headed to close out 2020.
Here's the current situation: According to Statista, 31 per cent of U.S. households own
smart speakers with virtual assistants. Furthermore, a recent study from our friends
at Adobe estimates that 48 per cent of users use voice for “general web
searches.” This makes sense considering that virtual assistants are now
natively integrated with nearly all personal devices, such as smartphones,
computers, and tablets.
Currently, about 44 per cent of users use voice search
technology every day. According to Growcode, 11 per cent of U.S. consumers who
own smart speakers use them to buy products. These numbers are expected to grow
as natural language processing technology continues to improve, users become more
comfortable interacting with artificial intelligence (AI), and COVID-19 regulations
keep people at home for longer and more often.
The Senior Vice-President of the Amazon Alexa unit recently
told GeekWire the organization has seen “a huge increase in the use of voice in
the home” during quarantine. According to the e-commerce giant, customers
asking Alexa cooking-related questions was up more in April than Thanksgiving
week of 2019.
A study from voice technology agency Voxly Digital found
that products like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are increasingly becoming
an important part of family life, in turn, making them “more significant for
brands,” who are deepening their ties with those types of voice assistants.
PYMNTS is also predicting that making purchases through smart devices is likely
to increase as consumers start to prefer contactless payments to increase their
safety.
It won’t be long until you’ll be refilling your medical prescriptions
through your smart speaker.
Anthem Skill recently started offering their members
assistance from the Alexa app as a way to help them refill prescriptions and
ask questions about balances in their health savings accounts, among other
tasks.
Want to learn more? Here’s a great “at work” listen on Voice
Search and the Future of SEO from Hubspot: https://www.hubspot.com/podcasts/skill-up/s01/e07-voice-search-future-seo