Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and deep tech are revolutionizing industries across the board and the impact is being greatly felt in the arena of Voice Search. According to Statista, the global voice recognition market size is expected to grow from $10.7 billion in 2020 to $27.16 billion by 2026. The estimated CAGR from 2021 to 2026 amounts to 16.8 per cent.
The consumer data analytics firm further says that by 2024, the number of digital voice assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world’s population.
As for the Indian market, a report from Google says that the percentage of Indians using voice search queries each day is almost twice the global average. Another industry report says at the end of 2022 India had more than 150 million monthly unique voice technology users.
So, how does technology now power this already burgeoning space of Voice Search, we asked experts. The opinion was unanimous that innovations in machine learning and artificial intelligence will be a game-changer for marketers using the powers of the voice search tool.
Power of AI and ML
With the way AI is coming to rule the technological world, Manika Juneja, Managing Partner, dentsu Creative India, says voice search is set to become a more convenient tool for the common people. “AI and machine learning will fuel the advancements of search management, including voice search; brands who discover how to optimize will take the lead against those who simply go for solutions at face value. New developments in the AI world are likely to contribute significantly to the growth of voice search by improving speech recognition accuracy, enabling multilingual support, enhancing contextual understanding, improving natural language generation, and facilitating integration with other AI-powered devices. These developments will make voice search more accessible, convenient, and personalized for users, leading to increased adoption of the technology.”
As for Rashid Ahmed, Digital Head of Infectious Advertising, innovations in machine learning will help solve the current accent or dialect problems of voice search. “For people conducting voice searches in the recent past (and especially for regional Indian languages), getting an accurate search and corresponding results page was often replete with errors. This has been a challenge. But with the growing adoption of voice search, and the tremendous machine learning at scale, which search providers like Google bring to bear, the ability of a search platform to ‘understand’ and accurately provide relevant contextual results has vastly improved.”
Developers looking at integrating voice-enabled offerings utilising AI and ML platforms are now more confident about the accuracy of voice-enabled systems as there is better ‘understanding’ of inputs in varied dialects and accents, Ahmed points out. “As more people take to voice search and voice-enabled applications, the overall results from those interactions will continue to improve.”
Citing the way NLP and ML will help in the development of voice technology, Niraj Ruparel Head of Mobile & Emerging Tech - GroupM India Emerging Tech Lead - WPP India says: “New developments in the AI world, such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, will contribute to the growth of voice search by improving the accuracy of voice recognition and enabling more complex queries. With NLP, voice assistants can understand the nuances of language and context, allowing them to provide more accurate and relevant search results.”
Multifaceted uses & the future
According to Swapan Rajdev, Co-founder & CTO, Haptik, voice-based research is unlocking multiple browsing options for the e-commerce industry and is going to be an effective tool in that category. “Streamlining the entire shopping journey begins with effortless product discovery. Product discovery has been made more accessible and convenient for consumers with the help of voice-based search technology, leading to increased conversions and higher buyer satisfaction. With voice-based search, e-commerce brands can unlock a more natural and user-friendly approach to browsing products and services that leads to higher conversion rates. Though voice technology has not yet become mainstream, it is fascinating to observe how brands are utilizing voice as a touchpoint.”
Juneja further explains how voice technology is here to stay and will change the way people look at search engines. “Voice will be the new search bar, considering the changing habits of people across generations and regions in the county. To match consumer expectations while taking into account the most important factors of ease and accessibility, voice-enabled interfaces are expected to become more personalised, effective, and even user-friendly.”
Sharing an interesting perspective, Amit Dhawan, Partner and CEO, Art-E says: “There is no better visualization of voice search than Iron Man's voice-enabled Jarvis. From voice-driven Google Search to AI-Powered voice search, we're moving very quickly towards a revolution, all for ease of access and ease of control. Challenges of multiple languages, dialects and accents are already being solved and very soon, we'll be shopping for our favourite products on Amazon by just giving voice commands to Alexa and so on, that too, in our native dialects.”
