世論 What Japan Thinks

With the launch of the iPhone 4S the issue of voice search has become rather a hot topic. This survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com was however conducted before the launch of the device.

Demographics

Between the 30th of September and the 4th of October 2011 1,091 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.8% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.6% in their fifties, and 12.1% aged sixty or older.

The introduction to this survey reports that first off the mark was Microsoft following their purchase of Tellme in March of 2007, which they then added to Windows Mobile 6.5 in 2009. Next, Google introduced voice search in 2010 for Android v2.2 (Froyo), and finally Apple introduced Siri to the recently-released iPhone4 S after buying out Siri in 2010, although Siri had initially offered their app on the iPhone 3GS at a date that I cannot determine right now. Perhaps someone can ask Siri when she was born?

Here’s docomo advertising Android starring Ken Watanabe as a tablet – the voice search appears at the very end.

Research results

First of all, 27.6% of the sample knew about voice recognition technology, but 43.4% knew about voice-based search; perhaps 15.8% thought the voice searches got routed to a call centre with human operators to do the transcribing? Indeed, that might have been an interesting question to ask!

Next, 13.5% of the full sample had actually used voice search, and they were asked the following.

Q1: On which of the following have you used a voice search function? (Sample size=147, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Android	91	61.9%
iPhone	58	39.5%
Other	3	2.0%
Don’t know	5	3.4%
Forgot	1	0.7%