HACKER Q&A
📣 voiceux

Why voice search is pretty much nonexistant in websites?


According to Google data, almost 50% of users are using voice to search on Google. This is one big reason why natural queries such as "what's the population of US" are of importance to Google.

However, almost no websites or mobile applications have this feature. Why is that? Is it due to bad developers tools for building voice search (eg. bad usability), because product managers still don't believe in it, because initial testing showed that people want to stop using voice after they land to the website or what is it? What do you think? Have you tried voice search on your application or website?


  👤 AznHisoka Accepted Answer ✓
Is there evidence that 50% of users use voice search? I know there have been “surveys” done but everyone keeps citing the same one, and who knows how accurate that is.

And even if 50% of all users use voice search, that doesn’t mean 50% of all queries are voice search. Maybe you only want to use it for very specific use cases like weather, and directions.

Personally many websites don’t even have great site search, let alone voice. You should focus on improving that before addressing the 1% of people who would like to use voice search.


👤 kypro
If I wanted to add voice search to my website, what would my options be?

I've not used it before but I'm aware of services like Amazon Transcribe. I'm sure a voice search could be build using that, but I'd still need to build it myself.

Things tend to become common place across the web when someone builds a simple plug and play service or widget to solve the problem, but I'm not sure that exists for voice search.


👤 logicslave
Clearly this is an advertisement for voice search

👤 kleer001
> Why voice search is pretty much nonexistant in websites?

Because people don't need it?

Isn't searching on a page done at the OS level? Or is this more about digging through a contemporary obfuscated UX with menus and pull downs that aren't immediately available?


👤 jolmg
> almost no websites or mobile applications have this feature. Why is that?

Wouldn't that be a feature of the virtual keyboard rather than the website/app? My virtual keyboard has voice input.