According to Pew Research, 77 percent of American consumers now own smartphones, and voice assistant technology comes standard with these devices. Additional research shows that 62 percent of smartphone users utilize the voice assistants built into their devices regularly.
Voice-controlled smart speakers such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomePod are becoming fixtures in homes and workspaces and are changing the way that people research products and services online. The latest Nielson research shows that nearly a quarter of American households own a smart speaker. The number of households with smart speakers grew by 78 percent in 2018, and it’s anticipated that nearly half of all American households will own a smart speaker by 2019.
With the growing prominence of voice technology assistants in smartphones, personal residences, and workplaces, it’s anticipated that half of all Google searches will be performed using voice dictation by 2020.
Thanks to Natural Language Processing, Voice Technology Assistants Are Becoming More Accurate
When voice technology assistants first rolled out on the iPhone 4S in late 2011, it was not the most accurate or user-friendly. However, significant enhancements in regards to natural language processing have since been made to Siri to increase the accuracy of user intent when delivering search results. According to a 2018 test, Siri was able to correctly respond to 74 percent of voice requests, which is an improvement over the 52 percent accuracy from the prior year. In comparison, Google Assistant is said to be the most accurate voice assistant with 85.5 percent of queries answered correctly.
While voice technology assistants still have a way to go with increasing the accuracy of queries, it’s important to note that they have made major headway in understanding the search queries.Google Assistant is the most accurate in both delivering search queries and understanding user intent, with Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Amazon Alexa following closely behind.
How Natural Language Processing is Changing the Way that Brands Market Themselves
With consumers’ growing dependence on voice technology to research products and services online, it’s imperative that brands re-evaluate their marketing strategies to keep themselves visible in voice search queries. Adopting a voice search strategy will not only help to keep your business relevant, but it can also improve the user experience when interacting with your company.
When people perform online searches using their voice rather than typing, queries tend to be slightly longer than traditional text searches. In addition, voice search queries have a tendency to be formatted in the form of a conversational question instead of throwing out a few keywords. With these factors in mind, a voice search SEO best practice is to incorporate relevant question keyword phrases into content. Also, producing high-quality content that clearly addresses relevant questions that your target audience is asking will help to earn a coveted Featured Snippets spot, which Google’s voice assistant focuses on when providing answers to users.
Incorporating voice search into your overall search strategy now will help you to continue to drive traffic to your website in the future. When performing a voice search, consumers are given the option to open the website from where the answer to their question was found.
Understanding that voice search is going to continue to grow tremendously in the coming years, businesses that take the time now to optimize their website content for voice search SEO will be the winners in the long run.
Companies such as Amazon, Google, and Apple realize the ease and convenience that voice search provides to consumers. As a result, they’re making a significant investment to continue to improve natural language processing to better understand the user intent behind search and deliver more accurate and relevant results.
In addition, businesses need to be using natural language processing to analyze the unstructured data that is generated online, such as social media posts, emails, and online reviews. Leveraging natural language processing can help marketers to conduct sentiment analysis of this unstructured content to get a better understanding of how consumers are responding to goods, services, and overall branding. It can also help to unlock valuable insight into the customer experience and make businesses aware of when improvements need to be made.
How New York Ave Can Help
Partnering with an experienced digital marketing agency like New York Ave can help you to make the most of the latest technology tools and insights such as natural language processing to strengthen your overall marketing strategy.
Please contact us today to learn how natural language processing can improve your digital marketing efforts.
