Social Media Marketing

Google: 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches

In his Google I/O 2016 keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20 percent of the queries to the search app and android devices are voice search. This is impressive although lower than what former CEO Eric Schmidt said in September 2010: he said “25 percent of Android searches in the US are voice searches.” The discrepancy could be due to Schmidt referring to only Android, whilst Pichai talks about Android and the Google search app.Regardless, it looks as if voice searches are growing, and not only for Google:

Search Engine Land reported a larger increase:

“In December, we reported on survey data from MindMeld that found that there has been a significant increase in voice assistant and voice search usage, with 60 percent of survey respondents saying that they had started using virtual assistants and voice search in the past 12 months. The range of virtual assistants, such as Siri, Cortana, Google Voice Search/Now, Viv, Amazon Alexa, and now, Google Home, are collectively training people to search using their voices and to become more “conversational” with search and mobile devices.”

Search is clearly migrating to mobile and voice faster than ever and it appears that Google Home is its long term bet in the market. Google also announced that it has already integrated a range of third-party transactional services into Google Home, including Uber, Pandora, OpenTable, Spotify, WhatsApp and Ticketmaster.