Bing Says 25% of All Searches Are Voice Searches | Hacker News Reader

Bing Says 25% of All Searches Are Voice Searches

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16 pointsriqbal22 comments

> Before long, I would expect closer to 50% of all searches to be comprised of voice searches.

I'd definitely want data from Google before making that kind of conclusion. More likely is that Bing isn't very popular, and so for a lot of people Cortana/Siri/Alexa is their only usage of Bing.

My thoughts exactly. Bing isn't the go to search engine for a majority of people so the primary areas I can see it being used is on mobile devices where the option to open a new google search tab isn't as simple as on your desktop.

Actually my first thought when I read the article was "25% of nothing is still nothing" ;) but maybe that was a bit harsh. Bing is after all being used by people who simply can't be bothered to change the default search engine.

I think that's the reason. Bing is not popular but gets used by a lot of IoT/personal assistant services and therefore the share should be higher than with Google.

Curious about Baidu though. With some languages it's much easier to speak them than using your keyboard, so people adopt this feature sooner.

Apart from that it would be interesting how search will increase if Messenger/Whatsapp would integrate that into their product. I feel like voice is used way more in messaging and some people only live in messengers anyway, so it could definitely help adoption.

The majority of these are probably people trying to get Siri to answer something slightly challenging and getting thrown into a Bing search instead.

What would be a reliable source of web searches market share ?

A few (ironically, Google) searches yielded wildly different results, reporting anything from 3% to 20% as Bing's share.

Regardless, even 1% would be a decent sample, I think, considering we are still talking about huge numbers, and people with iPhones or Android devices using Google as their main search would have similar usage patterns.

I'm an Android programmer and talk to Android users. I meet some people who use voice on apps a lot.

I myself try to use voice with Google Maps when I'm driving in a car. I don't want to fiddle with the onscreen keyboard while driving. It's success varies, currently it understands some place names better than others. But it keeps improving too.

That's my usage. I have a Windows machine next to my Mac that I only use rarely, but I often power it on anyway for Cortana. The majority of my 'searches' are just simple questions like "Hey Cortana, what's the time in Berlin?" where it's faster to ask than to fumble with my phone's world time app.

Back on the envelope - on mobile so forgive no sources:

  150b Bing searches/yr (from 12% mkt share)
  -->37.5b voice searches

  500m iOS devices (ignoring Cortana/Alexa as negligible)
  -->75m have ever used Siri (15%)

Implies 500 voices searches/year or one or two per day, per Siri user. Seems high

Edit: found a source on Quora that suggested 1b Siri queries per week. So it's in the ballpark- since not all of those will be web searches

As a Google voice user, I do probably 5 voice searches per day. Perhaps not typical.

I'm not sure the context is search in general because the context of the original statement is Bing only:

Representatives of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, stated at Search Insider Summit this past Thursday that a now quarter of all searches performed on Bing are voice searches.

Cartana does use bing, even exclusively afaik.

What proportion of that 25% actually returned correct results based on the users voice query?

Even though my phone supports voice search I never use the feature.

Not only do I not want to broadcast my search to the room/subway car, but also rather not have to type my search again after it fails to understand me.

And 25% of Internet Explorer usage is to download Firefox or Google Chrome.

So a third of users at least test Bing voice before searching for a different browser?

I can't help but think a lot of this are in the mold of "damnit, no, stop searching." - at least in my experience.

Still this is a lot higher than I suspected.

Xbox One Bing Trolling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvBwezmeW1M

"No Cortana I did not want you to search for Pizza places, I wanted you to call Mum."

It's still a voice search.

/yes I'm a huge luddite with my phone and use only one voice command at the end of the day, but I still see the above as being a non-trivial amount of the searches.

Im guessing its kids that dont know how to read/spell/type with iPads and parents that don't know how to change the default search engine. It would explain the word count per search increase too.

That definitely says a lot about the minimal search volume they have.

And probably a large percentage of all searches are for physical items such as keys or wallets.

Inb4 20% of those 25% are mistakenly activated voice searches.

Am I the only one surprised people actually use Bing at all?

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