Voice search has been a digital trend topic for years now, since the mass adoption of technology like Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri. Image search is going to find its place, but the trend conversation is moving towards conversational AI as the big disruptor.
When someone engages with a technology like Alexa, Alexa then has to tap into her corresponding search engine, Bing, to pull the right response, using Bing as the intelligence platform to power her as the intelligent agent. Side note, each intelligent agent has its own default search engine. Alexa uses Bing, Cortana also uses Bing, Siri recently switched from Bing to Google.
With search engine results still being the main provider of response content, this means we have to look at how search engines are pulling results based on a full sentence ask. It’s estimated that at least 40% of responses from digital assistant voice searches are derived from search engine “featured snippets”, not the long list of possible results that we get from a text-based search. What is a featured snippet? It’s position “zero”. Not 1, 2 or 3 in paid results or organic results, but the answer box that appears at the top of text search results.
This means that if websites aren’t tailoring site content, schema markup and structured site data accordingly, and if brands don’t have a strong SEO strategy, it’s likely the digital assistants won’t pick them up in responses.
With Conversational AI, brands can have more meaningful conversations with their target audience and customers - as long as they are set up to live in this world. They also have an opportunity to learn more about customer intent by how customers or potential customers are verbalizing their ask, which leads to better and more personalized marketing efforts.
Read more about this emerging topic on martechtoday.com.
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