Introduction:

Smart technology is here to stay, whether it be a smart speaker, a Smart TV or Smart Appliances. This newly compiled article discusses Smart speakers.

^[1]What are Smart Speakers?

Smart speakers are devices that enable voice activation. To active these devices, you speak to them. They are usually triggered by a name or phrase, such as “okay, Google,” “Hey Google,” or “Alexa.”

People can use these devices to find information about products, subjects, locations, and more.

Amazon and Google make the most popular smart speakers.

Alexa: What devices does Amazon offer?

Amazon offers numerous Smart Speaker devices. Their most basic device is the Echo Dot. This smart speaker allows you to play music, control smart home devices, make calls, set timers and alarms, play music, send messages, control lights, and more.

In addition to the Echo Dot, Amazon also offers the Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, and Echo Show. All these devices use Alexa for voice functionality.

Each of these devices gets increasingly more advanced than the primary device. Amazon also offers an Echo Dot specifically for kids.

The variety of devices offers many options for users, and they can choose the device that best matches their needs.

Hey Google: What are the different types of Google Smart Speakers?

Google’s Smart Speaker offerings are slightly less expansive. Their primary device, and the most popular one, is the Google Home Mini. Like the Echo Dot, you can ask the Google Home questions, set reminders, get news, play music, set reminders, and more.

In addition, Google offers Google Home and Google Home Max. These speakers range in price from $49 – $399.

The continued growth of smart speakers

Google Home and Amazon Echo are the two main types of smart speaker devices on the market.

Many other companies are trying to develop their smart speakers. For example, Samsung announced the Galaxy Home would be coming to the market soon. It’s a smart speaker device that operates on the voice search program Bixby for voice commands.

These devices are becoming more prominent in people’s homes as more companies develop their own Smart Speaker.

Thirty-two percent of consumers own a smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo. Of that 32 percent, 71 percent of smart speaker owners use the device every day. In addition, 44 percent use the speaker multiple times a day.

Considering smart speakers have only been on the market for about two years, the growth of these devices is rapidly increasing. As the popularity of these devices starts to grow, you must adapt your SEO campaign to keep up with this growth.

How do people use smart speakers?

Before diving into the nitty-gritty of optimizing intelligent speaker voice search optimization, you must understand how people use smart speakers. Then, when you know Smart Speaker’s circumstances, you can adjust your strategy to reach users better.

When people use smart speakers, it’s mainly in situations where their hands are full or a device, like a laptop or a cell phone, is out of reach.

^[2]How do Smart Speakers work

The key to the operation of smart speakers is the voice recognition technology that is used. Using voice recognition, the smart speaker can understand what is being said and act upon it.

Different manufacturers use different voice recognition systems: Apple uses its Siri assistant voice recognition, Microsoft uses Cortana, Google Home series, and Amazon Echo speakers use voice recognition schemes for their smart speakers.

Although each Smart Speaker system is slightly different, it is possible to generalize slightly to see the basic concepts when looking at how they work. Typically the Smart Speaker listens to all speech and awaits a “wake word.”

There is often a default wake word: for Amazon, the Alexa system awaits for the word Alexa, although this can be changed. Other systems have other words.

Once the system hears this word, it activates. It records what is being said and sends this over the Internet to the central processing area or voice recognition service for the system. The speech file is sent to Amazon’s AVS (Alexa Voice Services) in the cloud for the Amazon system.

The voice recognition service deciphers the speech and then sends a response back to the smart speaker.

The voice recognition service uses a series of algorithms so that the system becomes more familiar with your use of words and individual speech patterns. In this way, it learns how you speak so the system can provide a better service.

Typically when setting up a new smart speaker system, it will be necessary to run through a learning process for the smart speaker.

Smart Speaker speech recognition process

The technology behind speech recognition has developed hugely in recent years. A few years ago, speech recognition was a laboratory phenomenon, but now it is being extensively used in many areas, including smart speakers.

Although we all listen to others talking and perform speech recognition ourselves, it is highly complex when undertaken by computers.

Computers are programmed to recognize sections of words, known as “phones.” These are then linked with other phones so that “phonemes” are built, which are effectively different words.

^[3]Voice search

Voice search is a technology that allows the user to use a voice command to search on the Internet, a website or an application. As the result of advances in speech recognition, this feature first appeared on smartphones, making it possible to replace the search bar. Today, voice search is increasingly becoming a new way of making queries on the Internet, as evidenced by the emergence of new products such as voice assistants (Alexa with Amazon Echo, Google Voice Search, Cortana, Siri…).

^[4]How Does Voice Search Work?

Without getting too deep into the technical details of voice search, digital voice assistants work by:

• Processing and transcribing human speech into text
• Analyzing the text to detect questions and commands
• Connecting to external data sources such as search engines to find the relevant information
• Translating that information into a digestible format to fulfill the user’s intent

How voice search works are more complex than this, and there is a lot of machine learning going on so that these programs better understand natural language and true searcher intent. These programs are incredibly sophisticated and are improving tremendously.

Who Are The Major Players In The Voice Search Market?

The major players in the US smart speaker market are as follows (in order of market share):

1. Amazon (63.2%)
2. Google (31%)
3. Other (5.8%)

However, it’s important to note that most voice searches occur on mobile devices, not Smart Speakers. Thus, for smartphone assistants, the two significant competitors are Apple (Siri) and Google.

Conclusion:

The entire point of “Smart Technology” is to make your life easier.

Article compiled by hughesagency.ca

Article reference links:

1. https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/smart-speaker-voice-search-optimization.html ↑
2. https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/equipment-items-gadgets/smart-home/what-is-smart-speaker.php ↑
3. https://www.atinternet.com/en/glossary/voice-search/ ↑
4. https://www.wpromote.com/blog/seo/everything-you-need-to-know-about-voice-search ↑