Voice Search - who cares?

[nomis5]

I have read yet another article about optimising a website for Google Search.

I'm 65 and I doubt I will ever buy one of those boxes which will allow me to search by voice. No only is my age a factor but also the scary thought that the box will be listening to every word said in listening distance. They are probably recording all of as well but in a couple of years time this will be stopped. Google and Amazon will admit that a rogue programmer caused the system to record everything.

My question though is why should i put any effort into getting my website into the voice SERPS? What will it benefit me, the writer of the content?

[piatkow]

Voice on my phone just gives me results on the screen with or without a voiced response so no problem. Once you get away from a screen you have to be number one or you are dead.

The longer term issue is that people may be asking different questions with voice. So a typed query may be carefully structured "left handed widget retailers in Metropolis" while a voice query may be "I need left handed widgets".

Second issue of course is monetisation, if the machine just recites a snippet from your site then who will see the ads?

[MrSavage]

Geez I dunno. Who made the money from the selling that unit sitting on the counter? Geez, I wonder how hard it is to come up with a monetization model. It's not like the radio business has any idea how to make money from voice. Right? Give it time. Amazon has the most to gain from getting into everyone's home. Google needs the market to endorse the boxes more, and then while quivering with excitement, they will launch the first voice ad. Just like the radio industry does. Oh don't worry. There will be expensive boxes that comes ad free. There will be boxes that come with ads, but are given away for free. Conduit. Think of it as another tentacle. The last time I checked, everything has to be profit driven. So if the profit driver isn't evident yet, it's only because it's held back for now. If there wasn't a profit driver then these wouldn't be pushed as they have been.

[csdude55]

From the POV of someone that relies on ad revenue... voice search scares me :-(

Coming home from dinner, my girlfriend said that she'd read some people with her model of car that had a problem with the lifters in the engine. I wasn't quite sure what that meant, so I pulled out the ol' S8:

OK Google... what's an engine lifter?

She found the answer and read a short paragraph to me, answering the question. Great! Except that I never visited the answer provider's website (I don't even know what website provided the answer), and I never saw any ads.

So I got the answer, but who did I benefit other than myself?

[keyplyr]

I've been looking at adding voice support to my site search using the HTML5 Web Speech API [developer.mozilla.org]

Most of my pages already do well, just have a couple left to optimize for voice. I get more mobile than most sites because of efforts with SM and apps. I should take advantage of this potential.