Voice search is more popular than ever before. A recent Adobe survey found that 44% of the 1000 respondents asked used voice search every single day. That’s a lot of voices doing a lot of searching. But who have been the major innovators in voice search technology, and how did we get to where we are now?
Bell Labs and IBM
The earliest commercial example of what we would recognise as speech recognition began with a machine called Audrey, created by Bell Labs in 1952. Audrey wasn’t the brightest by today’s standards, recognising only a few spoken words and numbers. IBM improved the technology and in 1962 they showcased the Shoebox, which could recognise sixteen words and numbers 0 to 9. Impressive for the time.
Dragon Dictate
In 1990 the first commercially available speech-to-text dictation software was released, Dragon Dictate. Customers could speak into a computer and see it translated onto the screen without the need for a keyboard, a huge landmark in the journey towards voice search.
Google Voice Search
Now we’re getting warmer. In 2008 Google announced the launch of their Voice Search app for iPhone. Interesting, given what happened a few years later, in that it was aimed to boost the search giant’s ailing iPhone app. It worked pretty well and marked the dawn of a new age in voice search.
Siri (Apple)
It’s hard to remember now, but Siri was a bit of party trick in 2011. People enjoyed using the voice assistant and made Terminator jokes but not many people could have seen the surge in the popularity of voice search that was to come.
Amazon Echo
The home invasion had truly begun when Amazon released their friendly, talkative speaker in 2014. The big innovation here was that the Echo was ‘always on’, i.e. always listening.
Google Home
Google joined Amazon, moving into your home with the release of the first Google Home device in 2016.
What’s next?
With voice search going from strength to strength, watch this space for the next big innovation.
