The Future of Voice Search

The Internet has become an increasingly accessible source of information as more and more mobile devices have been designed with online features. Smartphones are becoming more commonplace and are challenging developers to create new ways in which we can interact with the Internet from a mobile device. Once such advancement is voice search, a technological evolution of common voice recognition programs. While most users have experienced voice recognition in one way or another, few users have fully interacted with voice search technology. The idea is simple: provide a way for mobile users to search the Internet without using microscopic keyboards or scrolling through massive amounts of text.

 

What is voice search?

   

There is no greater collection of information than the Internet. However, without a way to effectively search the Internet’s content, it becomes useless. As smartphones become a leading outlet for users to access the Internet, more effective ways of searching online have been developed. Voice search transmits a user’s voice to a digitally controlled database that runs this information through a series of voice-recognition algorithms and then sends that information back to the device to develop a search query. Basically, your smartphone uses the Internet to translate your voice into detailed code at an extremely fast rate.

The main resource of this technology is cloud computing. Voice search takes voice recognition to the cloud instead of the device itself, allowing for extremely high performance in both accuracy and timeliness. This is the main component that separates voice search from voice recognition.

Though voice recognition technology is familiar to most consumers, it has never been a fully functional technology. Voice search has taken the idea behind voice recognition, combined it with cloud computing (and a few highly mathematical algorithms) and turned it into a fully functioning tool.

What is the future of voice search?

    As voice search is implemented through familiar tools such as Google and in smartphones, we will most likely see even more creative applications develop. It is very likely that device control will soon be integrated with voice search technology.

    However, most exciting is what could come of language understanding technology combined with the voice search tool. Common search engines, like Google, match a search query to words in a documented text or written meta content. Language understanding technology takes a more practical approach by searching more abstract fields. To illustrate, a common search for the word “photo editor” would result in files or meta content containing those words. A voice search with language understanding software, however, would load a photo editing software, like Photoshop. Imagine your computer running a program simply because you asked it to.

    Voice search is a perfect example of how technology evolves in line with cultural trends. The Internet became mobile with smartphone integration and combined with the advent of cloud computing, opened the door for new search options to be developed. Those developments then have implications in other fields and work to push technology towards new horizons. Soon, highly effective voice search technology could be integrated into the way you use any electronic device. If you’d like to learn more about voice search or language understanding integration, please read this article.