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We suspect that most of the answers would be: Yes, of course! We ourselves were ready to click affirmatively on this claim. Until we got the opposite claim no less than from Google . Voice search is not the future of search, or at least not to the extent that it is widely believed to be.
A long dreamed dream
Back in 2016, Google launched Google Assistant enabling a new voice search experience that promised a new channel for content distribution. All indications were that this method of search would take precedence in the near future. What’s more, in 2018, the schema.org structured data specification called speakable was published, which was intended for structuring data on websites that publish news.

“When people ask Google Assistant – ‘Hey Google, what’s the latest news about NASA?’, Google Assistant responds with an excerpt from a news article and the name of the news organization. Then Google Assistant asks if the user would like to hear more some news article and also sends relevant links to the user’s mobile device,” reads the official statement from Google.
Until 2021, Google published an additional developer page related to the Speakable beta program. Publishers are encouraged to add Speakable structured data tags to their pages to help browsers and other devices identify which parts of content are speakable.
The general perception was that the industry was on the cusp of a new way to reach new site visitors, but it never materialized.
Google says voice search is not the future
In a recent Search Off the Record podcast, Google ‘s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed the future of search, and the discussion eventually turned to voice search.
John Mueller asked if the search industry will need to optimize for voice search in the future. Martin Splitt wasted no time in dispelling the idea that voice search is the future. There was nothing unequivocal about his answer.

When asked “Will SEOs have to optimize for voice search?”, Martin Splitt replied: “Oh God, a future that will never be. I don’t think so, because if we’ve learned anything…”, alluding to the long-ago beginning ideas in Google ‘s voice search. The inspiration for it was the famous Star Trek series in which the characters interacted directly with the computer and its interface. Several years later the attitude changed significantly.
Splitt ‘s explanation of why voice search won’t be the future may reflect a mature understanding of the technology now that we’re a few years into it. He mentioned that the “input modality” of voice search has changed, meaning that the way the search is experienced has changed, but that the part of search that processes voice commands hasn’t changed, which likely means that voice search-specific SEO won’t need to exist .
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Source: Searchenginejournal
Made by Nebojša Radovanović – SEO Expert @Digitizer