Not All Voice Assistants are Created Equal

This post was excerpted and adapted from Street Fight’s latest report, Local’s Voice-Based Future: The Rise of AI and Voice Search. Download the full report here, and stay tuned for more insights from Street Fight.Voice search continues to show signs of being a formidable modality for finding things. Gartner has projected that 20 percent of all user interactions on smartphones will happen through voice by next year.Speech-to-text processing and AI are meanwhile getting better by the day. Google Assistant is now at 95% accuracy. Today that involves simple tasks. Tomorrow it will involve more personalized and AI-fueled actions.For local commerce specifically, voice search could find lots of utility. Voice is inherent to local search and discovery, due to immediacy and sometimes hands-free requirements during high-intent micro-moments like shopping and driving.Further in support of voice search, highly motivated tech giants are driving it. Google, for example, puts lots of muscle behind voice (and visual) search to counterbalance text search’s app-driven displacement on smartphones.But it doesn’t end there. Several tech giants are chasing voice search and assistant apps. They’re motivated by different factors—each seeing voice as a way to support, grow, and protect their unique core businesses.