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Ask HN: Why voice search is pretty much nonexistant in websites?
According to Google data, almost 50% of users are using voice to search on Google. This is one big reason why natural queries such as "what's the population of US" are of importance to Google.
However, almost no websites or mobile applications have this feature. Why is that? Is it due to bad developers tools for building voice search (eg. bad usability), because product managers still don't believe in it, because initial testing showed that people want to stop using voice after they land to the website or what is it?
What do you think? Have you tried voice search on your application or website?
- AznHisoka 6y agoIs there evidence that 50% of users use voice search? I know there have been “surveys” done but everyone keeps citing the same one, and who knows how accurate that is. And even if 50% of all users use voice search, that doesn’t mean 50% of all queries are voice search. Maybe you only want to use it for very specific use cases like weather, and directions. Personally many websites don’t even have great site search, let alone voice. You should focus on improving that before addressing the 1% of people who would like to use voice search.
- voiceux 6y agoGood question and unfortunately I don't have access to Google's own data, so hard to verify. But you are correct, that the data seems to be at best misleading. The data is in fact from China and already pretty old. https://brodieclark.com/stop-using-comscores-2020-voice-search-stat/ https://brodieclark.com/stop-using-comscores-2020-voice-sear... But anyway, Google says that 20% of the searches (total amount) in their app is in fact done by using voice https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/voice-search-statistics/ https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and... Here's a few other datapoints, too https://voicebot.ai/2019/07/09/new-data-on-voice-assistant-seo-is-a-wake-up-call-for-brands/ https://voicebot.ai/2019/07/09/new-data-on-voice-assistant-s... - 58% of adults have ever used voice search (2019 data) And here some more https://searchengineland.com/how-much-should-we-care-about-voice-search-it-depends-on-our-target-audience-318752 https://searchengineland.com/how-much-should-we-care-about-v... - tech savvy users seem to be somewhat probable to using voice in search at least sometimes. And you are correct that most likely the searches are somewhat specific. If you are doing your philosophy paper, you are less likely to use voice than for example when you are looking for directions to the nearest gas station. Whatever the case may be, it's clear that voice search IS growing with the advent of voice assistants, ubiquitous mobile and better speech recognition.
- kypro 6y agoIf I wanted to add voice search to my website, what would my options be? I've not used it before but I'm aware of services like Amazon Transcribe. I'm sure a voice search could be build using that, but I'd still need to build it myself. Things tend to become common place across the web when someone builds a simple plug and play service or widget to solve the problem, but I'm not sure that exists for voice search.
- speechly 6y agoHi there! Voice search can of course be done by using something like Amazon Transcribe or Google Speech to Text. The problem however is that they just turn speech into text and that's not the best way to leverage voice in search. With these tools there's a bit jarring experience with waiting for the results and then either you have to submit the search query automatically and trust that there was no mistakes with the speech recognition or you have to click enter after making sure it was understood correctly (editing wrongly recognized utterances especially on mobile is very frustrating) While these are small details, they make the experience a lot worse. Our tool (yes, we have a technology that can be used here) combines speech recognition and natural language understanding in a novel way and in fully streaming fashion. It enables search experiences like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI68NT8D1m8 where the UI is updated as the user speaks. This makes it easy for the user to correct themselves by using voice and it encourages them to go on with the voice experience if there's no errors. Our tech is applicable to web very well: works on all platforms and we have client libraries for React and JavaScript for easy integration.
- kleer001 6y ago> Why voice search is pretty much nonexistant in websites? Because people don't need it? Isn't searching on a page done at the OS level? Or is this more about digging through a contemporary obfuscated UX with menus and pull downs that aren't immediately available?
- voiceux 6y agoI think people would need it if it worked intuitively and well. Of course you can just add a microphone to any text input and work from there, but a more well-working actual voice input would do miracles. I think current voice user interfaces are a bit like the touchscreens before Apple made iPhone - they did exist but the user experience was bad.
- logicslave 6y agoClearly this is an advertisement for voice search
- jolmg 6y ago> almost no websites or mobile applications have this feature. Why is that? Wouldn't that be a feature of the virtual keyboard rather than the website/app? My virtual keyboard has voice input.
- voiceux 6y agoIs it? I'm not sure as searching by voice is a bit different than text only and hence the whole experience could be different.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]