In July 2019, Voicebot.ai reported that 33% of users engaged with voice search monthly in early 2019, increasing from 25% in 2018.
The upward trend of voice search engagement opens the market for companies to develop products specially made to feature this emerging capability.
The commercialization of voice search technology has skyrocketed in the past decade, with more voice search-enabled products available than ever before. The Google Home, Apple HomePod, and Amazon’s Echo & Alexa are just a few of many new devices that were created specifically to utilize and integrate voice search.
Last year Statista reported that in 2018, over 34 million voice search-enabled speakers were sold in the United States, with 2019 sales projected at 36 million units.
Voice search technology and smart speakers are certainly here to stay, but the future capabilities of these devices are uncertain.
With this increasing number of people using voice search, the possibilities of advertising through these devices are seemingly limitless. The concept of voice advertising is still emerging, and “has the potential to be a lot more intrusive and irritating than visual or text-based ads” according to Rebecca Sentance in a 2018 Econsultancy blog post.
This emerging form of advertising has existed along with smart speaker devices for years, with the Google Home speaker “advertising” the live-action Beauty and the Beast in 2017. Although it was denied as an intentional advertisement, Google received backlash from consumers insisting that they felt it was intrusive.
When accused of subjecting random Google Home consumers to uncontrolled advertisements, the company responded in saying, “This wasn’t intended to be an ad. What’s circulating online was a part of our My Day feature, where after providing helpful information about your day, we sometimes call out timely content. We’re continuing to experiment with new ways to surface unique content for users and we could have done better in this case.”
Smart Speakers are putting our personal privacy at risk by actively listening to our conversations.
Jim Cridlin, global head of innovation and partnerships at Mindshare, a media and marketing services company, believes that voice search technology is advancing at an immensely fast rate.
The ability for these smart speakers, but more importantly advertisers and marketers, to understand consumers’ habits is reaching a new level. Frequently using voice search and allowing microphones to constantly be on is changing our conception of privacy.
In 2019, “Amazon recently filed a patent for its Echo device that can analyze a person’s voice to understand if they are experiencing feelings of happiness, joy or boredom,” Cridlin said. “With that data, companies can personalize voice experiences.”
As people continue to use voice search technology, the capabilities and personal understanding of our search commands will only increase.
Regardless of if privacy matters more than convenience, the global smart speaker market will surely continue to grow in the coming years. With the exponential growth already seen with voice search, one can infer the percentage of global users will continue consistently each year, until manual searches become outdated and nearly forgotten.
The long-term effects of smart speaker usage, on people who have become overly dependent is not yet known. Only time will tell how heavily humans will rely on technological advancements for the sake of convenience.
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I think it is going to be very interesting to see whether the public chooses to support or go against voice search technologies. It seems like everyone wants things more instant and more specific to their needs; but not too instant or too specific. People think their privacy is being invaded when a advertisement for a product pops up on social media after mentioning it in a conversation but won't hesitate to ask Google Home or Alexa to order them something when their hands are full. It seems like an even give and take at this point, but I wonder when the give will be too much?
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