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Clicks ’n Tricks – Charlie Stewart
voice-control-voice-commands courtesy of Pixabay

Clicks ’n Tricks: The year of voice

  •   19 Feb 2018
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by Charlie Stewart (@CStewart_ZA) Voice is in vogue — and it’s set to change the lives of consumers while creating huge complexities for marketers.

Techcrunch reports that 16% of Americans now own a smart speaker. That’s in addition to the virtual assistants we all have on our phones — more than 400m of which make use of Google Assistant… not counting the myriad of devices using Siri and Cortana.

Unsurprisingly, given all the hype around Alexa and OK Google, voice dominated the most-recent edition of CES held in Vegas early January 2018. Many exhibitors at the annual technology fair took the opportunity to showcase how they had built voice control into their platforms and gadgets. These ranged from the practical to the downright absurd.

Talking crap

Bosch demonstrated a series of wifi-connected devices that may be controlled by Alexa, while Kohler unveiled a rather perplexing (and, at US$6000, expensive) toilet which can be asked to create the perfect mood lighting for your morning ablutions, warm its seat and blow a jet of water you know where. If nothing else, Kohler’s bizarre offering has brought new meaning to the phrase ‘talking crap’.

While speech integration may give some product manufacturers a point of differentiation in the short term, where voice will really rock marketers’ boats in the coming years is in the search space.

It’s about the conversation

Gartner thinks that 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen by 2020 (and that from a report published back in 2016, which could be considered the stone age in a voice context). ComScore, meanwhile, believes that 50% of all searches will be conducted by voice within the next two years.

Driving the growing use of voice search are major advancements in the underlying technology used to understand what we’re asking for. According to Mary Meeker’s annual internet trends report, Google’s speech recognition error rate is only 5% — that’s down from 25% just a couple of years ago and corresponds with the threshold for human to human accuracy. And with the investment Google’s continuing to make in recognition, error rates will continue to improve, particularly in noisy environments.

Advertisers’ conundrum

Adoption of voice search will have huge implications for advertising. Without a screen to look at, the search-engine results pages we’re all accustomed to seeing when we type a query into our browsers will disappear. That means there’s no place for pay-per-click ads. And, if we call up a search for the latest news, we won’t have an opportunity to see the banner ads that dominate most publishers’ sites.

How companies like Google and Amazon will respond to this erosion of their revenue remains to be seen but it’s inevitable that they will find a way of baking advertising into voice search — probably presenting opportunities for it to be seen (or, should I say, heard) as additional content instead of the disruptive popup ads we’re currently served. And they’re unlikely to be as clunky as Google’s attempt last year to promote Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

While we wait for the answers, pragmatic brands should look to step up their SEO efforts to improve the chances of their sites make it into the organic listings. That means better content, a focus on optimising for long-tail queries, the adoption of schema markup and improving the mobile experience. All of which will be covered in a future column.

See also

  • Clicks n Tricks: Optimising for voice search

 

Charlie StewartCharlie Stewart (@CStewart_ZA) is CEO of Rogerwilco, a multi-award-winning independent digital agency best known for its expertise with Drupal, SEO and content marketing. A Scot by birth, he moved to South Africa in the early 2000s in his quest to support a winning rugby team — a search he’s reluctantly forsaken. Together with Mark Eardley, he co-authored Business to Business Marketing: A Step by Step Guide, (Penguin Random House, 2016) and may be found on LinkedIn. Charlie contributes the monthly “Clicks ‘n Tricks” column, which looks at how brands are using digital channels to engage their customers, to MarkLives.

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Columns

  • #AdChamps – Kyle de Waal & Morgan Botha
    #AdChamps – Kyle de Waal & Morgan Botha
  • #AgencyLeaders – Most Admired Poll
    #AgencyLeaders – Most Admired Poll
  • #CoronavirusSA – Special Section
    #CoronavirusSA – Special Section
  • #CustomerFirst – Craig Hannabus
    #CustomerFirst – Craig Hannabus
  • #NotSoOrdinary – Taazima Kala-Essack
    #NotSoOrdinary – Taazima Kala-Essack
  • #TheInterlocker – Emma King
    #TheInterlocker – Emma King
  • #Transformers Transform 2020
    #Transformers Transform 2020
  • #WritersBlock – Tiffany Markman
    #WritersBlock – Tiffany Markman
  • An Accountant in Adland – Siwe Lawrence
    An Accountant in Adland – Siwe Lawrence
  • Big Q – MarkLives Panel
    Big Q – MarkLives Panel
  • Big Reads on MarkLives
    Big Reads on MarkLives
  • By Invitation Only – Motive
    By Invitation Only – Motive
  • Campaigns – MarkLives
    Campaigns – MarkLives
  • Circulation Data – ABC Analysis
    Circulation Data – ABC Analysis
  • Clicks ’n Tricks – Charlie Stewart
    Clicks ’n Tricks – Charlie Stewart
  • Curiosity – Marguerite Coetzee
    Curiosity – Marguerite Coetzee
  • Dear Radio – Paulo Dias
    Dear Radio – Paulo Dias
  • Extracts — Books & Research
    Extracts — Books & Research
  • Fair Exchange – Erna George
    Fair Exchange – Erna George
  • Hard Relate – David Alves
    Hard Relate – David Alves
  • Herding Words – Wendy Shepherd
    Herding Words – Wendy Shepherd
  • Hermaneutics – Herman Manson
    Hermaneutics – Herman Manson
  • Masterclass Notes – Johanna McDowell
    Masterclass Notes – Johanna McDowell
  • Media Redefined – Martin MacGregor
    Media Redefined – Martin MacGregor
  • Mission – Tom Fels
    Mission – Tom Fels
  • Press Pass – Carey Finn
    Press Pass – Carey Finn
  • Q5 – Carey Finn
    Q5 – Carey Finn
  • SA TV Ratings – MarkLives
    SA TV Ratings – MarkLives
  • Spotlight – MarkLives
    Spotlight – MarkLives
  • The Martini Shot – Bobby Amm
    The Martini Shot – Bobby Amm
  • The Power Report – Megan Power
    The Power Report – Megan Power
  • The Suit – Jason Harrison
    The Suit – Jason Harrison
  • Thinking B2B – Warren Moss
    Thinking B2B – Warren Moss
  • Watched – Richard Lord
    Watched – Richard Lord
  • WTF?! – Leigh Tayler
    WTF?! – Leigh Tayler
  • Young, Gifted & Killing It – Veli Ngubane
    Young, Gifted & Killing It – Veli Ngubane
  • Zeitgeist of Now – Jason Stewart
    Zeitgeist of Now – Jason Stewart
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