• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, November 7, 2011

Type in the word "relevancy" linked to the name "Google" in the United States Patent and Trademark Office database, and click on the "search" button. Or clearly pronounce the words in a voice-assisted search tool and the two queries will likely return a completely different set of results.

The difference might not surprise many marketers, because the ability to conduct audio searches remains in its infancy -- but most will find that each holds insights into the future of search, a topic that Search Insider Summit attendees plan to discuss next month in Deer Valley, Park City, Utah.

A short study from Arora suggests that Apple Siri is reducing the number of Google searches. About 27 users among the 40 Apple Siri users participating in the study said they no longer have a need to use Google.

As the industry moves from typing letters into a search box to speaking search commands, products like Apple Siri, Google Voice Search, and Microsoft Kinect suggest that the future of search resides not in the hands of consumers, but in their voices. Not the voice of recommendations in the comment section of social and retail sites, but the human voice, inflections, and dialects across engines. That movement will also prompt voice interaction with ads.

The change would require the advertising industry to adopt a new metric for conversions to prove the worth of ad campaigns when consumers interact with them using audio or their voice. A recent Google patent filing points to using the voice ad interactions as a method of ad conversions.

As the patent explains, the metric would require a method for presenting a piece of content to someone, receiving input indicating a voice interaction, and transmitting the voice input to a content system. From there, the platform would need to identify a command response to the voice input and execute -- using one or more processes -- a command to modify the piece of content.

One claim in the patent clearly states: A method comprising: sending ads to a device for presentation; receiving a voice input associated with one of the ads sent to the device; processing, using one or more processors, the voice input to identify an ad command; and sending the ad command to the device, the ad command executable to reconfigure the one ad.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) should prepare for this change.