Voice search
Voice search is asking a search engine or assistant a question out loud, through a phone, smart speaker, car or AI app.
Voice search is asking a question out loud instead of typing it, to a phone, a smart speaker, a car or an AI app. "Hey Siri, where's the nearest coffee shop?" is voice search. So is talking to ChatGPT or Gemini in voice mode and asking which coffee grinder to buy.
For a marketer, the important part is what comes back. A typed search shows a page of results. A spoken answer usually gives one reply, read aloud, and often names only one or two businesses.
How spoken questions differ
People talk in full sentences. They type "coffee shop Leeds open now" and say "Where can I get a decent coffee near me that's still open?" Spoken questions are longer, more conversational and more often local or urgent.
The answer is short, too. A voice assistant reading out a list of ten links would be useless, so it picks one answer and reads it. On a speaker there's no screen at all, so you're either in that answer or you're not.
For example, someone in their kitchen asks a smart speaker for a cold brew ratio. The assistant reads out one recipe and may say whose it is. If that's Fernhill Coffee's guide, Fernhill gets named in someone's kitchen. If not, there's no second place.
Voice in the age of AI assistants
The old voice assistants were limited, and voice search got more hype than use for a while. AI assistants have changed that. Voice modes in ChatGPT, Gemini and others let people hold a whole conversation out loud, and the answers come from the same models and the same web searches as typed questions.
So preparing for voice is mostly the same as preparing for AI search: pages that answer real questions in plain, quotable sentences, accurate local details for "near me" questions, and a brand the platforms already know well enough to recommend.
In AnswerOrbit
We ask each prompt in each platform's own app, as a stranger in your prompt's market would. To get closer to voice questions, write some prompts the way people talk, in full sentences with their situation in them. See Topics and prompts.