The Mobile Marketing Association just commissioned some research into mobile search that you may have seen and some of it has been bugging me. As well as some unlikely results - 31% of the respondents used mobile search for the first time last month? I mean, c’mon, this isn’t very credible is it? Why would 1/3 of mobile users suddenly try out mobile search?
But the main thing is that 37% of people claimed they’d do more mobile search if it was voice controlled.
Hmmm. Rupert Murdoch coined a nice phrase a while back about Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. In other words, Natives are people who have grown up with the technology and Immigrants have learned how to use it as adults. As a parallel, no matter how long I live in Germany, people will always be able to tell I’m not a native speaker, as I learned it as an adult.
In the context of mobile search, it sounds an awful lot like they got a bunch of 50+ people and asked them what features they would like. To these Digital Immigrants, inputting text, is clumsy and cumbersome and anyway, isn’t a phone something you speak into?
But to a Digital Native, who can input text into a mobile as easily as I can type on a keyboard, who can input while blindfolded, in the middle of the night on Planet Dark, voice control just won’t make any sense.
Imagine if you’d grown up travelling by horse and never seen a car. Then you were asked to take a test drive. Assuming you managed to make it go at all, when you were asked for feature improvements, you’d probably ask for simple verbal commands (like “Gee up”), the ability to steer by attaching a role to the steering wheel and that the vehicle responded to nudges from your heels.
Ask someone who can actually drive a car and these features just aren’t required. Actually, I bet if you asked the same sample that the MMA used about extra features for a car, voice commands just wouldn’t occur to them - as they can already drive.
So, sorry, but Digital Natives are never going to need voice search. For the rest of us, we just need to get a bit more fluent with the device as it stands and where it’s going.
And for those people who read this and see an opportunity in voice search, please don’t waste your time.
[tags] mobile search, murduch, digital natives, digital immigrants [/tags]
Wow! You are direct. I agree that there is a difference between Digital Native and Immigrant, but there is another aspect that makes voice or text the right solution. Context matters. In a noisy area, such as sports stadium, or quiet area, such as a library, voice is simply not right for immigrant or native. However, driving in my car, text is not right, and even dangerous.
Agree completely! But just another thought re voice-based activations of anything: it’s not very natural/comfortable for human being to speak to an inanimate object without the capability for intelligent respose. There is a big difference between speaking to an object - and speaking to another person *via* an object. I would posit that digital immigrants would find speaking to an object a bit uncomfortable at the most of times. And I am sure that digital natives would find it even more so!
Bang on Jonathan. Voice search is not so much an alternative for clumsy-fingered text inputting - as it is an option to be used when typing isnt possible. Driving is a great example of one such instance - though this makes sense only if the search results are voice-based as well - imagine the top ten results being read out to you - and you select one based on the serial number. Why not eh?
And as for digital natives and immigrants - simplification is to reduce the gap - after all the purpose of technology is to make life easier isnt’t it? Keeping the digital divide wide open benefits only niche marketers - with narrow interests and small scale of operations.
Jonathan - not sure about driving. Most cars will have nav systems as standard IMHO, which will take care of most location/nav searches and it’s certainly possible that these may include simple voice commands. Not sure where that leaves search via a mobile while driving.
Another view would be that the mobile actually takes over from in-car nav systems and docks with the car when you start your journey, which is quite an interesting idea. In this scenario, the mobile will be the nav system killer, in the same way as it’s been the camera killer, the MP3 killer, the watch killer, the PDA killer, the Pager killer etc etc If that does happen, then voice may well play a role. Though I think that some other hands-free inputting “language” will emerge first - like jaw clenching, or something along those lines.
Shyam - ok with the first para. But I think you need to explain the rest if you want the rest of us to keep up.
Russell
Russell,
You may be right, however let me play devils advocate. Yes 31% mobile search seems ok, globally speaking. And yes there must be digital immigrants and digital natives, because Murdoch said there are, so that must be the truth. However, if we peal the global onion we see vast differences between usage of mobiles in Europe and Asia vs. usage in the US. For example there’re substantially more off-deck mobile content across the pond then over here in the US. So much so that if someone said there was 70% offdeck content in the US a digital native would say “no way Jose”! On the other hand the digital immigrant would say “hmm, now back in the motherland/fatherland ….” While back in the digital immigrants’ country of origin all digital natives there know that offdeck content is pervasive. Ergo, a high mobile search figure on one point of the globe may not reflect other parts of the globe. So the question is where did that statistic come from, reflecting what part of the world?
Modestly, Gameronin