No, 2020 will not be the year of voice search

This week, I attended a series of conferences on the theme of discoverability, where the presenters tried to explain how to ensure the influence of brands. A short sentence repeated by several speakers challenged me, as I always hear it: “50% of searches on the web will be done via voice search in 2020. “If you work in content marketing or search, you may have already read or heard this sentence at least once. Am I wrong?

Despite my strong desire to launch the debate, I refrained from intervening with the following question: we’re now in 2019, in this room full of web and communication professionals, how many of you do at least one voice search per day? The answer would probably have been well below 50%, and for good reason: the functionalities of voice search are still limited. However, the myth persists. Too many digital and search professionals have been using this data as an argument of urgency and prioritization to clients who eventually drink the same kool-aid.

Please give me a break.

I’m evidently not the first to speak ill of this perception changing statement. A few months ago, while attending the SearchLove Boston Conference, I was pleasantly surprised to hear one of the presenters from Distilled’s shout from the heart: “Please, we are search professionals, let’s stop using this statistic as an industry.” Let’s be smart. A statistic taken out of context is not of much value.

But where does this alarming 50% prediction comes from anyway?

The initial quote was taken from a September 2014 Fast Company interview with Baidu’s former Chief Data Scientist, Andrew Ng:

At the moment, around 10% of Baidu search queries are done by voice, with a much smaller percentage carried out using images. If progress continues at its current rate, however, Ng forecasts that in five years time at least 50% of all searches are going to be either through images or speech.

For the record, Baidu is the most important search engine in China, with an overwhelming market share of 70% in December 2018 (vs. Google’s 2.59%). The statistics were impressive at the time: in two years of functionality life, voice search already represented 10% of the total searches done on the Chinese search engine. But these forecasts need context : they were specific to the Chinese market and Baidu, based on the launch two years earlier of Baidu’s voice assistant, and also including image-based research.

In Google’s world, the first voice search features were released in November 2008, well before Baidu’s. However, it’s only in May 2016 that Google announced that 20% of mobile searches were done via voice. And Google here was specifically talking about mobile, unlike Baidu, which in 2014 was talking about 10% of global voice searches. Why such a difference between Asia and, to generalize, North America and Europe? Consumption habits.

China has experienced incredible growth in recent years, which has changed the way Chinese people consume. Added to this, the cost of smartphones has fallen sharply. These major changes have made the Internet accessible to hundreds of thousands of people who until now could not afford to buy a computer. These new Internet users – or mobinauts – had therefore never learned to use a computer keyboard and thus encouraged the emergence of voice research in China. Andrew Ng mentions in his interview:

The primary catalyst for a step-change in how search works today is the rise of smartphones and tablets, which are taking away more and more market share from traditional PCs. This is particularly evident in countries like Baidu’

s birthplace China, where many users are connecting to the Internet for the first time–primarily by way of mobile devices. Of the 632 million Internet users in China as of June this year, 83% accessed the web with a mobile phone, according to figures from China Internet Network Information Center. Most of these users haven’t organically learned how to use text-based search.