Voice Search: What is this?

Around us, the Internet of Things does not stop spreading. More and more, we will live surrounded by intelligent and connected gadgets that are going to do things for us with a simple voice command. 

This, called Voice Search, is another one of those key revolutions that occur in the online environment progressively (although very fast), until getting into our everyday habits almost without realising. 

Today, we are going to explain a bit better and at a general level what this technological advance is which will certainly be a transversal turning point in the coming years. 

Being somewhat reductionist, we could define it as the possibility of using a device capable of recording human voice (yours), understanding search orders through software (understand what you are asking) and return results present in a search engine (give you useful solutions). 

It is clear that the growth of this technology go together with the registered  due to the use of mobile devices. Not too many years ago, desktop computers or laptops dominated Internet connections; But neither they nor search engines were prepared to use a voice-based interface. 

Mobiles spread across the market, leading to a Mobile First world. And those behind the great search engines realized that Voice search could be applied to them using a native feature (and common to all phones) as microphone is, and that opened a lot of opportunities. 

Google announced this feature in June 2011, integrating it in both desktop version and your Android operating system. Near a year later, the search application for IOS made voice search come to Apple phones as well.

Almost at the same time to Google's efforts to adapt its search engine to voice searching, Apple won the game in virtual assistants. 

Siri was a real revolution. It was like having a virtual "butler" that allowed you to interact with the phone by running simple queries and actions, but something never seen before. 

We could ask it about the weather, ask to make a call to a contact or know the sports scores of the weekend without having to touch the terminal. 

Surely the key to Siri's success on Google's voice assistant is that they were able to provide this wizard with a certain personality and also it did everything starting from the phone. 

At that time, the search engine par excellence was determined to launch the famous Google glass: connected glasses that used augmented reality and speech recognition. 

This device did not leave a mark in spite of being really interesting, perhaps because technology was not refined enough, or maybe because the market of the weareables was(and is still) far from being mature. 

After Siri many other assistants arrived: Cortana in Windows (mobile and desktop), Amazon´s Alexa, Google Now, Samsung´s Bixby... 

With the growth of connected devices and the Internet of the Things making its way in the market through multitude of gadgets and hardware, so did virtual assistants and, thanks to it, the Voice Search. 

We find it in weareables as watches, tablets, smart TVs, connected vehicles... and, of course, the intelligent speakers that are the paradigm of the Voice Search at home, especially for their ability to interact with other devices or manage home automation. 

In this case, and for the second time, Google again loses its ranking as leader to a direct competitor. It was not Apple but Amazon that first hit the target of the niche of smart speakers, and they did it very strongly. 

Amazon Echo was released in November 2014 and came to stay, always attentive to our needs: Just tell Alexa what you need and immediately plays that song, a movie, tells you what is the weather like, the recipe of Benedict´s eggs or buy sliced bread on Amazon. 

Only in the U.S., where it was originally launched, moved from a bit more than a million and a half to the 31 million of devices installed in a little over than two years. 

Although hard competitors, like Google with its home system or Apple's Home Pod, have landed in the market, the short-term reality is that Amazon has a position of strength and is very well aligned with its interests in terms of Voice Commerce , together with the advertising business, will be the most profitable of this new reality. 

We will have to see if the giant of eCommerce is able to keep the scepter. There are predictions saying it will be difficult due to the strength of Google and the atomization of devices capable of carry out search by voice. 

There are many reasons why users are showing so much love for voice searching. Some of the reasons that make us choose to talk to devices are: 

These 3 reasons are the main ones, but you also have to bear in mind that there are people with special needs in the field of accessibility and others who just find it more fun to do so. Actually, there are as many reasons as people.