Google Assistant, Bixby, Cortana, Siri, or Alexa, no matter what your voice assistant’s name is, they all work on the same tech – voice recognition software. And, unlike earlier models, today’s assistants are better able to understand what we are saying and give us the results we are looking for.
It’s a far cry from the early days when you had to speak extremely slowly and clearly, with the right accent, for your assistant to be able to understand you.
But, with improvements in artificial intelligence, the utility of voice recognition software is growing in leaps and bounds. Have a strong accent? That’s fine, you may just need to spend a little time training your voice assistant so that it understands you properly.
Don’t use the Queen’s English? That’s also not a problem – the software now understands natural speech. In fact, it has become so adept at this that top SEO companies advise their clients to ensure that their sites are optimized for natural speech.
It is good news for those of us who do not have the best grammar habits but certainly not something that your English teacher would approve of. Natural speech means the way most people speak in practice, rather than the way they should speak according to grammatical rules.
Which means that we will start to see companies communicate less formally and more on our own level. It’s a side effect of voice recognition that could be an interesting one to watch going forward.
Another aspect that is bound to be interesting is what we start asking voice search to help us with. People most commonly use it to look for information online, but the infographic at seotribunal.com shows that there’s more to it than that. They also use it to schedule alarms, play music and even check sports scores. The fourth most common use might surprise you – asking fun questions, AKA, teasing the voice assistant.
If you haven’t asked your voice assistant to sing you a song or asked it if it loves you, you have been missing out. Some of the assistants come up with some pretty fun answers which we won’t go through here. If you want to know what these are, you are going to have to find out by asking.
