Are You Ready For the Conversation of the Future?

I love to have conversations with people. This is not news to those who know me; I’ve always been this way. But lately, my family has been having more “conversations” with non-humans since we added smart speakers to our household, and we’re not alone. According to a study by Voicebot.ai, one-third of Americans now have smart speakers installed in their homes, a 32% increase over a year ago. This trend will continue upward in the coming years, but it’s not the device that is changing how humans interact with computers; it’s the technology behind the devices that are changing the world. Over 100 million smartphone users currently use voice assistants, and this number is also rapidly increasing.

Voice technology isn’t new; Apple introduced Siri ten years ago, and Google introduced voice search in 2009. I’ll admit that my experience with Siri in the early years wasn’t always a good one. Fortunately, developing AI and related technologies have dramatically improved the voice-powered human-computer interface, and this is just the beginning.

User demand is the primary driver of this shift. Millennial consumers are more comfortable with rapidly evolving technology that focuses on speed and convenience. The global pandemic has accelerated the need for voice interaction (as with many other contactless technologies and scenarios), and adoption has skyrocketed. Still, the foundation was already laid for voice to be the dominant user interface of the future.

So what does this mean for content creators and marketers? How can we prepare ourselves (now) for a world where consumers primarily converse with machines?

Today, when we search for news, information, and entertainment, we look to our mobile devices and desktop computers. We visit sites we love and trust to browse for information/entertainment, and when we want something specific, we type terms into search engines. Results populate the SERP, and we choose which ones most closely fit our needs. Discovery will continue to be crucial in a voice-enabled world, so optimizing your content for search remains a priority. The difference is that we don’t type questions into search windows the same way we speak! Roughly 75% of voice search results will rank in the top 3 positions for a particular question on a desktop search. I’m not going to explain how to incorporate schema or optimize for voice search in this post, but rather focus on what the future might bring from a consumer-first perspective.

How does discovery change when we interact with a smart speaker? According to an Adobe Analytics Survey, the most common voice searches on smart speakers are asking for music (70%) and the weather forecast (64%), followed by fun questions (53%), online search (47%), news (46%), and asking directions (34%). This will change as adoption increases.

Assuming your content has been optimized for voice search, are you sure you deliver the correct elements to fulfill the consumer’s needs? What happens when the technology improves and speakers, screens, appliances, devices are all seamlessly integrated? Is the appropriate content to be delivered verbally? Via video? Or maybe infographics with voiceover? What about AR and VR? This isn’t the distant future we are discussing, and we must find a way to optimize our current content libraries (in addition to new content) based on this future. The big players (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) are investing heavily in this area, and that should be a clear sign that our future is voice-enabled.

I’ll leave you with a fun experiment you can do (if you don’t do this already) to get an idea of the possibilities ahead. Ask your favorite voice assistant (Siri, Alexa, Google, etc.) for something specific, and see what happens. Did the answer fulfill your needs? How would you improve the response if it could seamlessly be displayed on your TV, refrigerator, car console, etc.?

Drop me a note at gregory@g-sqared.co if you’d like to discuss!