As voice search and virtual assistants like Amazon’s Echo or Apple’s Siri, have become more conversational, they have become more user-friendly and more mainstream.
In December 2015, Search Engine Land reported on a survey MindMeld released showing positive growth in Voice Search engagement.
To that end, sometime this year Google will be releasing Home, a virtual assistant which will reside in your home and help you with tasks like making a reservation for dinner via OpenTable, or scheduling an Uber or purchasing concert tickets via Ticketmaster (just some of the 3rd party applications that will be integrated with it).
People are constantly turning to Google to search for everything on their laptops and smartphones, so it only makes sense that Google would want to make not only search, but everyday tasks, easier and faster, especially on mobile. If you are going to carry Google around with you in your pocket while you’re out and about, then why not take it to the next level and have Google in your home where you can put down the Smartphone and just walk around, talking out loud, having a conversation with an object sitting on your kitchen counter…wait…don’t we worry about people who do that?
Humans love it when someone figures out a way to make a task more convenient, easy, and less time-consuming. We flock to the new way of doing something, the way pigeons flock to tourists holding out handfuls of feed in St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy.
We are in the future. Home only makes sense, considering how we are incorporating technology so quickly into every aspect of our lives. And the lines between those lives, the personal and the professional, are blurring as more and more people have jobs that require them to be online or work virtually. We crave ease of use, ease of task, and our lives get faster and faster as companies like Google and Amazon work to delight us.
For some, this can be a bit unnerving, this idea of having a Home or an Echo in your house, listening to everything you say. But progress marches on. And who knows? In a few years, perhaps all new home construction might just come with a standard built-in personal assistant (you just choose which one you prefer and it’s installed automatically).
We adapted quickly to texting instead of using email and shopping on smartphones instead of desktop computers. It won’t take long for more and more people to get comfortable with a virtual assistant right in their home.
When Google called it Home, they weren’t being clever – they were making it very clear they want “in”, in more ways than just your browser.