Voice Search
Lars Neumann
Director SEA
Founded 2009
130+ Employees
More than 100 swiss and international
brands
PPC, SEO, Programmatic, Social,
Digital Analytics, Creatives, Software
Engineering
IAB Switzerland: Digital Marketing
Agency of the Year 2017
MA in Sociology at University of Zürich
& Webrepublican No. 4
Since 2015 Director of a team of
50+ PPC experts
External lecturer University of Zürich
Chess, football, swimming, BBQ
@lupmac
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-neumann-98963761
webrepublic.com
R.I.P. Keyboard, the.
1982 – now?
Source: Google I/O 2017
AI, Mashine
Learning,
Bots, IoT on
the peak of
inflated
expectations.
ComScore
By 2020, 50% of search
will come from voice.
Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google)
20 percent of queries on the
Google mobile app and on
Android devices are
voice searches.
Source: Google I/O 2016
Gartner
«By 2020, 30 percent of web
browsing sessions will be
done without a screen.»
Source: http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3482117
Source: Mary Meeker, KPCB 2016 Internet Trends
Source: Google I/O 2017
Source: http://hci.stanford.edu/research/speech/
Voice up to
3x faster
in words per
minute than
keyboard.
Conversation
is the
universal interface.
• Hands busy
• Eyes busy
• Multi-tasking
• Private spaces
• “Familiar” shared
spaces
• Instant experts
• High expectations
• Low tolerance for error
Users in context
Soure: Google I/O 2017 - https://youtu.be/0PmWruLLUoE
Source: Mary Meeker, KPCB 2016 Internet Trends
How many screens do you
have in your car?
Auto
Source: https://www.android.com/auto/
Have you been talking to your
watch yet?
Source: Apple Keynote September 2017 https://www.apple.com/apple-events/september-2017/
What about radio?
Source: Voicebot.ai
From questions to statements:
«I’m hungry»
* Source: https://getstat.com/blog/the-featured-snippet-refresh/
Share of Featured Snippets growing
Share of snippets*
• January 2016: 9.28%
• July 2016: 15.0%
• April 2017: 23.25%
Voice searchers hear
only one result.
 Featured Snippets
Source: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Misconceptions? Mispronunciations?
• Language recognition (switching from german
to english within a sentence)
• Names (try Porsche, Yves Saint Laurent)
• Accents (swiss german vs. german)
• Slang (sup!?)
Still some challenges
Speech Recognition
Gets better by the year
Source: Google I/O 2017
Google Pixel Buds
Instant translation.
Source: store.google.com
 It’s the Babel fish!
Source: Microsoft internal data 2015
Speech searches are longer
No search term report by Google
on speech based search queries.
Yet.
Source: Google I/O 2017
Shift from one-way
communication to
two-way conversation.
Source: https://qnamaker.ai/
Chatbots might get
relevant for voice
search.
Learn about how
they work.
Design
conversations.
Instead of ad copy, we
might be writing dialogs
soon.
Source: https://developers.google.com/actions/dialogflow/first-app
• Identify voice queries in your search term reports
(where, what, show me, look for, order, …) with more
than 4 words
• Optimize for Featured Snippets
• Have structured data ready (product feeds, location
data, etc. ) and get comfortable with APIs
• Learn about conversation design (think: no screens!)
What you should do now
Thank you!
@lupmac
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lars-neumann-98963761
webrepublic.com

Voice Search | Hero Conf 2017 London | Lars Neumann