The Internet has become an increasingly accessible source of information as more and more mobile devices have been designed with online features. Smartphones are becoming more commonplace and are challenging developers to create new ways in which we can interact with the Internet from a mobile device. Once such advancement is voice search, a technological evolution of common voice recognition programs. While most users have experienced voice recognition in one way or another, few users have fully interacted with voice search technology. The idea is simple: provide a way for mobile users to search the Internet without using microscopic keyboards or scrolling through massive amounts of text.

What is voice search?

The Internet is an almost endless source of information, though if the Internet is unsearchable it becomes useless; imagine an encyclopedia with no index. As smartphones develop to the point of accessing a full version of the Internet, it has become necessary to also develop new and more efficient methods of searching for information online. Voice search takes your speech and transfers it digitally via the Internet to a remote database that computes this information through a voice-recognition protocol and then returns that information to your device. Essentially, voice search uses the Internet to translate your voice into searchable text.

All of this is made possible by utilizing cloud technology. Because Voice search takes voice recognition to the cloud instead of a mobile device, it allows for very high performance in both response and accuracy.

While voice-recognition technology has been around for quite some time, the way most consumers have interacted with it has been through robotic customer care. Voice search has taken recent cloud technology, as well as a few well-written algorithms, and turned it into a highly functioning voice recognition tool.

What is the future of voice search?

    As voice search is implemented through familiar tools such as Google and in smartphones, we will most likely see even more creative applications develop. It is very likely that device control will soon be integrated with voice search technology.

    However, most exciting is what could come of language understanding technology combined with the voice search tool. Common search engines, like Google, match a search query to words in a documented text or written meta content. Language understanding technology takes a more practical approach by searching more abstract fields. To illustrate, a common search for the word “photo editor” would result in files or meta content containing those words. A voice search with language understanding software, however, would load a photo editing software, like Photoshop. Imagine your computer running a program simply because you asked it to.

    Voice search is a perfect example of how technology evolves in line with cultural trends. The Internet became mobile with smartphone integration and combined with the advent of cloud computing, opened the door for new search options to be developed. Those developments then have implications in other fields and work to push technology towards new horizons. Soon, highly effective voice search technology could be integrated into the way you use any electronic device. If you’d like to learn more about voice search or language understanding integration, please read this article.