Did you know that machines today can understand the English language almost as well as our brains can? According to Howard Lerman, voice assistants can transcribe audio files spoken by people with around 96 percent accuracy. That’s roughly as good as a person hears. In the field of voice search, this standard has only been reached in recent years.
Howard Lerman and his co-founders, Brian Distelburger and Brent Metz, realized the growing importance of voice search a full decade ago. “We realized that enterprises would need a way to control their information in all these digital services, these intelligent applications, voice search applications and bots, the same way they manage the content on their websites. And that’s why we founded Yext.”
It was a prediction that could not be more accurate today. That’s because of one of the most interesting facts about the field of voice search: people don’t talk the same way they type. A good example of the effort to adapt to language, as Lerman tells us, is Google Assistant.
Voice Search provides answers. A web search simply shows results.
“For example, if you want to know how many calories a Big Mac has, you just enter ‘Big Mac calories’ on Google. But if you’re searching using Google Assistant, you say: ‘Okay Google, how many calories are there in a Big Mac?’ We call this second variety natural language processing, or NLP.”
To produce the best possible search result for NLP, existing systems need to be converted. This makes it possible to actually understand what the user wants. This is no longer done through a mere comparison of keywords, the way it’s been done up until now. Among other things, Google has separated the keyboard key from the microphone key in its application.
“Voice is real. All you have to do is take one look at how people use voice search in China. And that’s the way the future is happening.”
In the current episode of our podcast, Howard Lerman delves even deeper into how Voice Search differs from the normal search function; the direction in which the trend is still evolving; and how you, too, can use Voice Search for yourself.
We have even more on the subject for you in our stories. Here you can find an overview of all stories on the topic voice.
