It matters how users use your app. Giving more ways to operate your apps will somehow increase the user’s satisfaction ratio. Users want a painless operation of an app during driving, eating and workout. Before 3 4 years, voice search was counted as a totally un-identical technology, but in recent years, voice search involves in all kind technology. Nowadays, any featured packed app, wearable devices, and IoT devices are hard to imagine without the voice command compatibility.

However, not mobile apps, but smart speakers like amazon echo and Google home occupy the highest, almost 95% of the user share. Still, when the future scope of voice search has already been started peeping out, so many Android apps don’t bother to have voice search compatibility.

According to a marketing guru Nail Patel, if your app or web hasn’t optimized with the voice search that you are already behind. Apart from this, if we think economically, then the data comes out from the survey conducted in April 218 shows us that 58% of the US costumers have used voice search to find the local business.

Voice search enabled app has more potential to remain installed in a user’s phone for a longer time. Typing is the only form of digital communication, this legacy of mobile app development has now become past. Voice search enabled apps are taking the world by storm. If you haven’t added this applicable feature into your app, know the reasons why you should do it now.

Why give voice command ability to your app?

1. User’s Need   

We have discussed that a voice search enabled app lets users to use the app in a very easy way. Understand the fact that users are always engaged in doing something. If they feel irritation to use your app, you will straightway lose users. Users want a friend-like experience while using the app. Thus big brands like Starbucks and Domino’s have added voice command feature in their app to order the food.  

2. Increase the speed of the app  

People hate when your app takes time to load or takes times to turns the pages. According to Google data, if an app takes more than 3 seconds to load, users decide to abandon the process. Thus, it is very important for you to make sure your users will get a seamless app experience. With the voice command, the app can work 0.54 second faster.

3. Your app can work with Google assistance       

Adding voice compatibility in your app means you bring your app under the boundaries of Google assistance and other voice-enabled speakers. In this way, the app will act on the command even the given command has been given on Google assistance.  

To give you the more brief, let’s quickly see some numeric figures to understand.

• According to comScore, by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
• In 2018, almost $1.8 billion of online sales has been performed by voice commands. And it is an estimate that it will reach up to $40 billion by 2022.
• The smart speaker is a major share of voice-enabled technology. By 2020,  21.4 million smart speakers will be there in the USA.
• According to Alpine.AI, there were one billion voice searches per month as of January 2018.
• 72% of the users who are using voice-enabled technology, use it for doing their daily tasks.

How to add voice technology in the mobile app?

Before going further, please understand you are developing an Android app, using Google’s API. That means Google is the development platform and Google assistance is a technology platform, based on it, your app will run. Any app which will have voice technology must have integration with Google Assistance. In a broader term, an app can use voice technology for Google assistance in two ways.

• Either use the explicit approach and add a voice technology in such a way that a user has to use specific voice command with the app name to open the app. Example of this is, when a user says “open ABC app”, your app will open.
• Or use the implicit approach where the user asks for a service to Google assistance and Google assistance itself suggest or open your app. Example of this is, when the user says, “want to book a movie ticket.”, your app opens if your app is providing movie ticketing service.

Now let’s understand two very important components of integrating the app with Google assistance.

• Action packages are something Google provides to make the coding easy. Action packages are the metadata of any action, which Google assistance understand and work to fulfill that action.
• Mobile app functionality comes next. When Google assistance understands the action, that action transfer to your app and returns to the users.  Here Google Assistance works as the mediators.

Understanding a few initial concepts let’s move ahead and starts with a few simple learning. In this blog, I will give the example of how you can add voice search in your app which hit when users give a command with the name of your app. So this is an explicit approach.

Firstly, you need to enable the voice search in your app. For that, you need to declare an intent filter with the Google assistance search filter. The intent is nothing but a simple object that performs a simple activity, reserve the taxi, take a not, set alarm, etc.

<activity android: name = “SearchActivity”>

<intent-filter>

<action android : name =”com.google.android.gms.actions.SEARCH_ACTION”>

<category android: name = ”android.intent. category.DEFAULT”/>

</intent-filter>

</activity>

This code has to write in the AndroidManifest file.

Now, in the next step, you need to get the intent, verify the action and get the query.

Intent Intent = GetIntent();

If (SearchIntents.ACTION_SEARCH.equals(intent.getAction()))

{

String Query = intent.getStringExtra (SearchManager.QUERY);

Domysearch(query);

}

}

In this code mentioned above, there is one more GetAction intent which has the voice command of the users in the form of text. This command compares with the search intent and shows the result with the search manager.

Here is the list of few inbuilt intents of Android.

 Final words:

Bringing your mobile app under voice command technology is a very easy task. By writing a few lines of code, one can easily integrate the app with Google assistance. By doing so, an app owner will get so many economic benefits. In this blog, we have learned a tutorial of a simple process, but there are many more things you can do with your app. Since voice search is becoming the favorite way for searching service, you have to add voice technologies in your apps to dominate your competitors.