Google Insights on Voice Technology, Conversation

From the Google Blog.  Their take on voice, conversation and expectations.

Five insights on voice technology

By Scott Huffman  VP, Engineering, Google Assistant

Over the last couple years something interesting happened—millions of people began having conversations with their speakers, cars, computers and phones. Voice technology is fundamentally changing the way we use we our devices, often in ways we didn’t expect. 

We’ve learned a lot about how we can better serve people’s needs with voice, helping them save time and get things done. Here are a few things we’ve learned since we introduced the Google Assistant nearly two years ago.

Voice is about action.

When people talk to their Google Assistant, they’re usually trying to get something done. Assistant queries are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than Search, with people asking for things like “send a text message,” “turn off the lights,” or “turn on airplane mode.”


Why do we think this is happening? For many tasks, particularly while you’re on the go, it can be much easier to get things done through voice. I can say “turn on the lights and play some music,” without having to worry about which app I need to open. Even for basic things like creating a calendar invite, I don’t have to look down at my phone or interrupt what I’m doing, I can just say “create an appointment for noon on Saturday.” These seem like small things, and they are. But they illustrate what makes voice so unique—the technology allows me to complete a task in a way that feels natural. The more we can build these types of experiences, the closer we get to an ideal Assistant.

People expect conversations.

When people start using voice assistants, we often see very simple commands. But very quickly, expectations go up in terms of complex dialogue. We might see “weather Chicago” typed in Search, whereas with the Assistant we see much longer and more conversational queries like “what’s the weather today in Chicago at 3pm.” On average, Assistant queries are 200 times more conversational than Search.

We’ve seen that even simple commands can take all forms. For example, people ask the Google Assistant to set an alarm in more than 5,000 different ways, which means that we have to build the Assistant to understand this conversational complexity.  .... "