For any business at present, online presence is of utmost importance. Advancement in the field of Artificial Intelligence has made things quite easy on the managers’ end. To retain or manage customer queries, issues, and other particulars, we see chatbots, automated ordering system, and much more. For online shoppers, convenience is of the highest priority. In providing convenience to the customers, voice search is gaining popularity each day. All one needs to do is say what the user wants to be searched or looked for; the smartphone does rest of the job.
Why is Voice Search Highly-Demanded?
In the United States alone, more than 40% of adults and teenagers use voice search regularly. When asked about the reason, the answer is convenience and simplicity. Thanks to having a smartphone for every individual voice search facility is available all the time for its users. The reason why users prefer voice search in the field of eCommerce is they don’t face any difficulty in usage. The voice recognition is accurate; around 95% of the time and understands more than 100 languages. Other than smartphones, voice search features are now expanding in home appliances, computers, tablets, and other electronic devices. As you can see from the chart below, voice search is highly-demanded and will be the next most used technology among the Internet and electronic devices users.
How Does Voice Search Work?
From a user’s end, voice search works in the blink of an eye. You have to tap in the voice search button, say what you are looking for, and the voice search assistant will perform the task for you based on your instructions. As far as the back-end work is concerned, the assistant recognizes the speech and comes up with possible outcomes for the speech.
Voice Search Trends
Recent voice search trends suggest that two years from now, voice search will be the preferred mode of online search for more than 50 percent of the users. This is a great opportunity for marketers to utilize voice search features to tap into a more significant customer segment.
The growth of voice search usage. To keep up with the increasing demand for voice search usage, the speech recognition market will triple its growth within the next five years. Data collection and storage has become more accessible than ever before. Convenience and ease of use facilitated the increasing voice search usage.
Better consumer experience. The stats on Voice Search 2018 shows that this feature for eCommerce helps to build better customer experience. The younger populace is opting to voice search more compared to the adults, and they are the main target group in the eCommerce sector. The customers prefer voice search for seeking online information since they can multitask through this.
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Impact on commerce. The idea of online purchase came into being to provide convenience and the fact that people are unwilling to put in time and effort to go a store and search manually for a product. For online purchase before, users had to type what they wanted and thus needed to provide full concentration there. Now customers can simply focus on the task that they are doing and order voice search assistant to do the job for them.
Advantages of Voice Search
As already mentioned before, the number of users opting to voice search is on the rise. This means using voice search will hold on to more customers. In short here is the list of voice search advantages:
- simplicity;
- customer’s loyalty;
- better conversion results;
- advanced navigation through the website.
Regarding customer satisfaction, the consumers prefer talking about the product rather than typing about it. Therefore, the chances of marketing techniques and tools driving into sales become higher due to the use of voice search. Let’s move on to the tools and devices that help businesses and customers to use voice search technology.
Voice Search Assistants
Voice Search assistants are in literal terms your assistant for seeking online information or purchasing a product. You make a purchase decision by talking to a bot. This is more of a conversation than typing what you need. In simple terms, you will speak something; the assistant will recognize it and provide you with an answer verbally.
Voice Search Market Leaders
First mover advantage and brand recognition worked behind making the following market leaders in voice search.
Google Assistant
Google assistant can recognize your voice and perform the task being asked on the tap of a button. It can also provide reference information when asked for it.
Amazon Echo
Amazon Echo has started the journey in 2014. In simple terms, this voice search performs the command as per the instructions of its users. This is an excellent example of a personalized voice search.
Siri
Siri is made for iOS users. This is more of a conversation tool other than merely voice search. Siri will answer queries, provide recommendations, and understand the user choices after a period of usage.
Cortana
Cortana is a product of Microsoft. This voice search is expanding in android and hopes to come with an iOS version as well.
Mobile Devices and Voice Search
According to Statista, 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice tech at least once a week. The overall number of search queries isn’t significant; however, it tends to be growing for the last 2 years.
The first question that app or website owner should ask is the following: In which situation, people are more likely to use voice commands instead of typing the question? Stone Temple Consulting carried out the research which shows that in 2019, people tend to use voice search at home alone, with friends or at the office alone – 30% to 60% respectively. There are even more places and situations where people can use any voice assistant, and this is good news for those who want to add voice search in their projects. Now, let’s move on to the voice search strategy for a business.
A Baseline for Voice Search Strategy
As a voice search was introduced by Google, we can make a conclusion that SEO optimization is the upmost point in building the voice search strategy. The second point is how voice search is performed on different devices: whether these are voice assistants like Siri on iPhone or Google Smart Speaker, they all have one thing in common. Voice assistants respond to the questions with a snippet that reflects the “featured snippet” on mobile and desktop results 41% of the time. Only the top search results reach the customers for every 2 or five queries, or a few answers outside the top results, but rarely.
How to Improve Search Results?
- Target different queries for your product/service. You can use services like Answer the Public, or Google first queries to get the most popular questions.
- Keep answers short. Make a limit of answers under 30 words. This will help you to reach higher positions in queries.
- Increase your pages’ speed. Page speed is crucial not only for a customer but for voice assistants, as the average page with voice search result loads in 4.6 seconds. Thus you need to control and optimize your website speed.
- Use https to appear higher on Google’s search results. According to Backlinko statistics, voice search results from websites that use https appear on Google’s first page on 70.4% more than other websites. Also, https make your site secure from man-in-the-middle attacks.
For better user experience, voice search is going to be a useful tool for improving store results. With the speech recognition facility, even a child can look for options online simply by speaking what it wants. People who have a functional disability to type what they want will be able to use search by voice feature for conveniently seeking online information.
As we work quite a lot with Magento-based stores, we want to give you some options on how to implement the voice search in your Magento 2 store.
Choose Voice Search Extension For Magento® 2 Store
At present, Magento 2 Store provides two voice search extensions. The increasing demand suggests that the scope will expand further.
Search by Voice
Search by voice possesses the quintessential characteristics of a voice search. It recognizes the speech and performs the task assigned to it. The task is mostly limited to searching the sites or places; the customer is looking for. It is compatible with Magento 2.1- 2.2 Community edition.
Voice Search by Emipro
This extension is available for Magento 2.1 – 2.2 Community or Open Source editions. It gives you an opportunity to add Voice assistant and supports multiple languages with the current language of the store. However, this extension is compatible only for the Chrome browser. The price is $50 for the 12-month support.
These are the two most known tools to implement voice search in your Magento store. However, many extensions and devices have voice search, and for sure, there will be more options for Magento store owners soon.