What Consumers Want from Voice, An Amazon Follow-Up, and More.

31 Must Know Stats About The Continuing Growth of Voice Commands With Smartphones

BY ERIC ENGE

An exceptionally-interesting survey, all the way through. Of note: two of the top four voice behaviors are online search and map navigation, and a feature request for “more results that answer my question directly without having to visit a website or another app.”

Making Sense of Amazon’s Push Deeper Into Local

BY MIKE BLUMENTHAL AND YOURS TRULY

A follow-up to Minutive, Vol. 39, in which Mike and I discuss Amazon’s positioning relative to its competitors. If there’s one line I want to highlight: “Amazon needs neither advertising revenue nor hardware revenue in order for Voice to add massive value to their bottom line.”

Google Local Shopping Ads Showing in Pack Style Layout

BY MIKE BLUMENTHAL

Meanwhile, Google showed this week just how desperate it is to monetize mobile as much as it can, before voice starts eating away the internal organs of its cash cow.

What We Learned From Analyzing 1.4 Million Featured Snippets

BY A.J. GHERGICH

If you don’t want to pay for those mobile ad slots, snippets are the best long-term investment for your organic search dollars. A.J.’s “Practical Applications” at the end are a gold-mine of tactics.

Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: People aren’t sticking with voice apps they try

BY JASON DEL REY

This strikes me as a short-term problem, largely due to just how new the voice platforms are. Most voice apps/skills have been released just to test the waters at this stage. And it’s partly due to the minuscule friction to “download” new voice apps (in this case, compared to smartphone apps).

My guess is by the time we start seeing Superbowl ads for truly powerful voice apps, the use-once-and-abandon behavior will mirror what we see on smartphone apps today.

Study: SMBs Slow to Adopt Tech for Analytics, Customer Data Management

BY JOE MORSELLO

As I talked about with Mike Blumenthal a couple weeks ago, I just don’t think Analytics scratch an SMB (or at least VSB) product itch. The lack of CRM adoption, though, is one that I see decreasing in the next few years as more SMB/VSB-friendly systems around customer intelligence emerge.

Uber hires former Google search chief Amit Singhal as SVP of Engineering

BY DARRELL ETHERINGTON

Bummed to see such a brilliant guy go to work for such an ethically-challenged company, no matter how big its computer science problems are. :/