Someday soon, many of us will be giving our digits a permanent rest and using only voice interfaces for internet searches. When that day comes, we'll be telling our children and grandchildren about the good old days when we typed individual letters with our fingers to find anything on the web, prefaced by, "You kids today, you want it all on a silver platter!"
In her recently released "Internet Trends 2016" study, Mary Meeker, partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, reported that by the end of last year, 65% of smartphone owners in the U.S. were using voice assistants, up from 30% in 2013 (see chart from Meeker's report), and that as of May 2016, one in five searches on Android phones were voice searches, and the share is growing (see chart). Sales of the Amazon Echo and improvements in speech recognition technology are also driving this trend.
Optimizing content for traditional, typed-in search is not like learning how to find the right notes on a clarinet—the algorithms, unspoken rules and methodologies keep changing. Voice search is a whole new ballgame. The phrases people use for voice searches tend to be different from written-out searches, and those content marketers who can adapt their content for voice searches are going to be the early winners in the race for brand visibility.
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