 So hey everyone, I'm Gaurav, I've been into this industry for almost over a decade, about 13 years now and into multiple different roles. I ran a couple of companies in my earlier life, which seems like a lifetime, sold one of them and then essentially been working with Srijan for the last good seven years, building businesses for them in different markets. So right now, I essentially take care of the North America market for Srijan and it's the sort of New York. Alright, thanks. What would you be speaking about today, Gaurav? This has been an area which has been of interest for mine and kind of now became a revenue generation line for us for some time now, which is voice first, kind of got into this for almost like 30 and a half years back, just out of the interest piece. And I think the fundamental thing that we have to realize is that we are at a place where now we are reinventing the internet. So the way that internet was or the way that internet, we knew internet at one point of time is essentially now being reinvented in a way via voice first. Obviously, everybody don't agree with that, but it's definitely a good piece to discuss about. Absolutely. I think we want to discuss pieces like this which not many people will agree with because that's what would widen our own conversations. And in today's talk, Gaurav, who would you say is likely to benefit most from the topic you're going to give today or the topic? Anybody who owns portals or websites or build websites or both of them, obviously when you're building a site for your client, you want to make sure that you can maximize the ROI. If you own a portal, if you own a website, if you own a business, online business, any kind of online business should worry about voice first. All right. Special content. All right. Okay. So Gaurav will be starting his presentation in just a bit. But before he does that, here are the basic instructions for everyone who is joining in from YouTube or Zoom. There will be about 20, 25 minutes of initial presentation by Gaurav. And we'll try to not interrupt Gaurav at that point of time, let him complete the presentation at the end. And during the presentation, if you have any questions, if you're on Zoom, you can use the Q&A feature or the chat feature to put in your question. If you're on YouTube, you can put a question on YouTube as well. And someone from Gasky is going to forward that question over to me. So that I can take up that question after Gaurav's presentation happens. Once after about 25 minutes or so, once Gaurav's presentation completes, when we open for the Q&A, at that point of time, you can also raise your hand or put in a question, another question in Q&A. And if you're on Zoom, I can also patch you in so that you can ask your question directly and have a quick chat with Gaurav as well on this. So with that instruction set, Gaurav, let's start with your presentation and let's see what voice search is all about. Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks everybody for joining the call during the talk today, whatever platform you are. You know, couple of things, right, before we start, here's my handles. If you want to contact me after the talk, right. If you, you know, there's a tour handle, gmishra, LinkedIn, gmishra.com, right, it redirects you to my LinkedIn profile and you can find the slides at bit.ly. Right. Feel free to reach out to me and if you want to talk anything about voice first and what we are doing in the industry, right. And before I start, right, you know, usually, you know, start with some context and why it was first. But, you know, right now we will jump into, directly into some success stories, right. So why you should even, you know, waste 20 minutes or next 30 minutes talking to me and or, you know, listening to me, right. So let's, let's hear about some of the success stories, right. So this is L'Oreal, right. There's a video out there you can, you know, I will not play the video right now. Once you look at the slides, you can essentially play the video and hear about. So the gentleman here essentially, you know, owns the, the, the web, you know, or the organic traffic acquisition for L'Oreal, right. And he's talking about how they have been investing into voice and how voices helped them big time, you know, from a voice search query's point of view and how they have benefited. Right. And being early, what helps is the company like L'Oreal and, you know, and when they, when they jump into something very early, right, with their money that they can invest, right, they can really, really, you know, you know, benefit, right. Another piece is Arica, a banker, you know, you have a bunch of them in India as well. But this is Bank of America. And they've been, you know, using, you know, a big, you know, they're really well known right now from a, from an assistant point of view. They have six million users. And you know, it's now very well accepted, you know, slowly and slowly, now globally as well, but at least in, you know, in America, where, you know, if you, if you call up particular, you know, call, call center number, you're going to talk to a particular virtual assistant, right, which is going to, you know, ask some basic question and do a self service, right, you know, and you can find a ton of examples in India as well. Right. This one is one of my favorites, right, so, and, and, and you, you'll, you'll say that why this is, this is not voice, right, but this is, this is very much to do with voice. This is NYT, New York Times, and there's a New York Times section called New York Times Cooking, right. New York Times, what they did is that some many, not many, but few years back, New York Times decided that they will go back and change their content management system in a way that, you know, it is creating the cooking, the recipes in a more structured format, right. What does that mean is that they had like literally 50 fields, right, in which, you know, you had to fill all the 50 fields for the recipes to, you know, get created, right. Today, they literally own that, you know, segment and, you know, it's a, it's a vertical search engine, right. If anybody wants to find a recipe, you know, New York Times cooking segment is literally a vertical search engine, right. Now, that's a huge segment where, you know, businesses can invest in or should invest it, right, and I'll talk about why, why I think about that, you know, in the, in the later, later slides, but I think, you know, while I'm talking about success stories, right, and, and this is a slide which came in after I did this talk, like, a couple of times, few times, right, and, and this, this definitely always used to came in questions, right. What's the frustrating if you have used, you know, Alexa, if you used Google Home, and, and, you know, you said, ah, it doesn't work, man, you know, apart from basic stuff, it just doesn't work. And then there are other concerns, right, the government is tapping into your, you know, what you are saying, there is NSA, there is, you know, all kinds of recordings happening, right, there are, there are bots that can take jobs from humans, right. So that's not good for the humanity and things like that. So there are a lot of worry for sure, but we'll not talk about that. Yes, so yes, there are a lot of worries. Yes, there are a lot of concerns, but we will not talk about that. We will, we will figure out that if the voice, all right, becomes a big, you know, place, right, which it's very clear now that it will, right. But even if you are, you know, not very confident that, you know, this is a place that, you know, because it's frustrating, you know, there's a lot of privacy issues, but, you know, you know, if it will become what we should do today, what we can do some small things today to ensure that we are prepared for the future, right. It's something that we're going to talk about, right. So why voice content strategy is important, right. Why, right. So, you know, as I said earlier, right. So even if you think that it's not something that will become big today, right, or, you know, in the future, right. Why you think, why, why it's important, right. See, building a content is very expensive, right. You know, and it takes years to essentially build content, NYT Cocking Cooking. It took them, you know, four, five years with a very massive team, right. We essentially build that entire content database of recipes, right. Imagine if they have to do that tomorrow again, right. The kind of the, you know, expensive cost that could be for them, right. And, and, and, you know, the way that, you know, we've been handling voice in that, okay, voice is another channel, one other, you know, platform and, you know, my web is a different platform and I'll create a different content stream for that, which, which, how people started looking into it and it's just not feasible. You can't create two different content streams for two different mediums, right. It's just very impractical, right. It's, it, you know, a lot of people that do, do say that. Unfortunately, when I, when I'm working with organizations, they, they, they realize you can't do it. It's, it's very impractical, right. And, and the main pieces that we have to understand is that, you know, conversational legibility of the content, right. And we'll come to that later on what that means. So, so, you know, you know, on a high level, what it means is that when you read a content, you can very quickly understand the context of that content by just skimming through that content, right. You will read a line at the top and then, you know, you'll, you'll just leave a couple of car, and then you'll, you know, go, go down, but you still get the context of the content, right. You know, what does mean and what you'll, you'll find what you wanted, right. And you, you, you will get that information. On the other hand, you know, when we are talking about voice, a conversational legibility is very important, right. That means that can a person who is consuming that information via voice understand the whole context of that content, right. Which we don't really, you know, think about when we build content management system. You know, as I said, you know, very high verbosity when, when, when you're, you know, you know, using, when, when you are reading web-based content, right. It's very visual, screen-based, and, you know, what we, you know, don't realize that, you know, the, the hyperlinks, right, which is the, which is the core, you know, strength of, of the web-based world, you know, maintains relationship between different content, right. So you get essentially context from content, you know, Google core, you know, algorithm is around hyperlinks, right, between each other and, right. And you have a very complex information architecture to, you know, find different context for different content. You don't, you have nothing, nothing like that on, on, on voice, right. You have no hyperlinks, you don't have complex information architecture, and it's a zero user interface, right. Either verbal or oral, right. And that means it's a very low verbosity tolerance that you, that means that when you're building a content for, for, for, for voice, you have to ensure that, you know, the context precedes the content, right. So, you know, you can write a five, five thousand word article, right. And in that five thousand article, you might just want to, you know, highlight like three core different points in a, you can still write a five thousand article about three different core points, right. But when you are, you know, building a content for voice, right, it's very important to say that what these three core points are, and say it in a minimum word possible, right. Because you are in a verbal and oral mode, right. Somebody is hearing you, isn't eating you. So, you know, a lot, lot, a lot of mistake. Let's give, let's take some examples from the real life world, right. So, you know, this is a, a page that we, that we took, that, you know, one of, one of my friends pressed and worked for Georgia government, the Atlanta government here in, in U.S. And, you know, the, you know, they essentially have built up Alexa skill where, you know, people, you know, especially old age folks are, you know, you know, marginalized folks can, you know, know about the benefits that the, you know, the, the Georgia government is, you know, providing, right. And the translated FAQ over, which is, which is kind of the gold mind if you're looking at the voice, you know, into an Alexa skill. And so one of the, you know, benefits on the page of employment benefits page, FAQs on the employment benefits page said, how long can I receive benefits, right. Now, if you are serving the same content over, you know, if you're using the content on, on, on website, which they did initially and they realized that it's not working because of few problems, right. And that's where the conversation legibility come in. Because when the person is reading this, how long can I receive benefits on the, on the webpage, right. He says, okay, yeah, you know, I, I am on the, you know, page which is, you know, conversational, which is on the employment benefits and, you know, it, you know, it's, it's saying employment benefits. But, you know, when it's hearing, he doesn't know that he's on the page, the content is coming from the employment benefits page, right. And that's why he doesn't understand what that means. So that you have to make sure that the entire context is in the content. That means how long can I receive employment benefits. So these are some small, small things that, you know, you have to ensure when you're building content that the entire context is in that content, right. Similarly, is, you know, some, some things like that learn more about payments. You know, when you're hearing this, learn more about payments and Alexa, you don't know what does mean, because you can't click somewhere. And that's why when you're doing creating hyperlinks, make hyperlinks inside the content, so that, you know, if you are reading the same content on the web, you can click and go through and do something. And if you read, if you hear that same content over Alexa, you, you, you're still fine with that, right. Cool. So, you know, I think it kind of set the context down out of the stage, right. So in the voice, you know, the, you know, seven seconds is what all we have. Make sure what do you want to, you know, you know, tell the people, you can communicate that in the first seven seconds. Okay, it should be the goal from a, from a content strategy point of view, right. Now, let's talk about some practical things that you can do. Okay. If you want to, if you're building voice, or if you, you know, if you, if you're building for Google, right, you will all know, or if you care about SEO in the first place, right, you would all know the featured snippets, right. And what I tell, you know, my clients, my listener, everybody today is that, no, don't do anything, you know, out of the box, but just build your content to ensure that it can't come on the featured snippet, right. And if you do that, you should be good. Right. You know, you know, a couple of things, you know, that, you know, why, you know, what, what, what the pain and where, where the featured snippet and that position zero is coming in, which we call on the SEO, you know, Google about position zero, if you want to know more about that. But if you look at a normal keyword search, right, which is a, then a screenshot said YouTube SEO, it gives you a, you know, typical search page with some videos, links, blah, blah, blah, right. But if you do the same search in a normal, in a, in a NLP way, right, which is the way that we talk, which is the way that we consume information on voice, right. How do I rank my YouTube videos? Look at what Google did. Google pulled out a video. This suggested a clip of 83 seconds, right, because he knows that, you know, you can't really consume a content, which is a lot of content, a big content of, you know, five minute video or 10 minute video on voice. They suggested an 82 seconds content and say that in this video, this 82 second is what is relevant for you. Right. This is what Google is doing today, right. And, you know, and you should worry if Google is doing it, that means that the brand words or the words that is important for your business, how are you ranking on the natural language search for that keywords? If we should worry about today, right. So, you know, how do you get on the, you know, feature snipper or position zero, right, optimize for long-waited keywords, you know, three to five more keywords, right, you know, optimize content for whom, how, why, right, where, you know, and these things keyword and use schemas, right, you remember, right, and YT cooking that I talked earlier, you know, schemas are the holy grail, which are, you know, now become very, very important. I mean, as the webmaster, the SEO experts have been talking about this for many, many years. But today, if you're not having schemas very, very tightly integrated with your content, you know, you are doomed, right. So ensure that you have schemas very tightly, you know, you know, integrated with your content, right. And, you know, the one important piece is that ensure that what are the seed. So in a, in a non-voice world, there are a lot of CTS forms, you know, buying buttons, payments, blah, blah, blah, right, different clock call to actions. But in the web, in the voice world, the only CTS right now is, is the contact information, the phone number. So ensure that you have a, if you have local listings, which is, you know, kind of the where voice search, you know, is essentially seeing a lot of traction, you have a working phone number working there, right, in your listings, in your content, right. Because that's what Google picks up in a lot of cases. If you remember the famous video that Google showed, where they, you know, call a barber, right. You know, again, you know, quickly, you know, very similarities between featured snippets and what voice search optimization, right, create a content, you know, that answer a specific question, write a topic specific page, like look for questions, right, look, look, you know, see that can you answer a, a one question in that particular content, right, one theme, one particular theme in that particular content, right. And, and, and it will go for longboard keywords. So if you, if you, if you just build your content for featured snippets, right, and I will not go into deep into all this thing, because we have limited time, right. But, but just, just worry about how would, would you manage your content or, you know, optimize your content for featured snippets, and you should be good from a voice search optimization point of view for now, right. Another important thing, and why featured snippets, sorry, why schemas, you know, is are more important than, you know, why I was emphasizing on inviting cooking earlier is Google really recently announced that, you know, they, you don't require unlike Alexa, where you have to submit a skill, build a, build a skill and maintain that skill. Google is not, you know, going to ask that if you have a schema on your website, and it's well defined, you know, with all the content, it will pick up and build an action automatically out of it. Okay. That means that if you, if your competition is having a good implemented schema, there's a good chance that Google will pick it up, build an action out of it, and it will serve it to the people who are asking questions around that particular, you know, question, right. Some of them which are very well, which with Google picked up, you know, you know, in the initial, you know, pilot or if you will, right, where they, you know, they are turning them into schema or news, recipes, podcast, FAQs and how tos. These are the five ones that, you know, Google has picked up. So and while, you know, news and recipe and podcast is not something that is, you know, relevant to every business, how to is relevant to every business. You know, the whole idea of having a website is that you could tell the visitors that what, what your business does, right? What, how to do something with your business, how to essentially buy from your business in the first place, right? So if you don't have a how to schema implemented, you are missing something, right? So go back, at least implement how to schema of nothing else. If you don't want to do anything else, do at least how to schema. Okay. And make sure that it is implemented there. FAQ schema, how to schema. These are some very basic things that, you know, should be there. And you know, just, you know, I mean, I've worked with enterprises globally, you know, with some very, very large fortune 500, you'll be you'll be shocked that, you know, how less people, you know, think about schemas, right? How it's an afterthought. Don't make it an afterthought. It's not going to help you, right? You know, again, another example of schemas, you know, it's an FAQ schema, you know, which I was talking about. I'll quickly, you know, talk about skippable schema. That's something that Google launched recently. And Google said, yes, there is a lot of schemas out there, right? But, you know, and, you know, yes, we are talking, asking everybody to build the content in the future, from a, from a, from a, you know, structured format. But it, you know, the reality is, you know, most of the most of the web by well, you know, is not there, right? They have not implemented schema in a good way. And it's very unstructured content all over the place. So they said, if you if there is a, if there is a particular piece, a particular content that you want to serve on the voice, just implement speakable schema, right? And with a title and a description, title is essentially the keywords around which you want to, you know, optimize your content for in the voice and the description and the content is the kind content that you want to serve as an output, you know, in the voice. So they're making, they're trying to make everybody's life easier, right? And, you know, this is right now they have limited because it's a beta, beta, you know, stage and it's only limited to the, to the media organizations, right? So, you know, backing, breaking new and things like that. But there is no reason that why it will not open up or why Google would not, you know, we silently write, roll it out for every other business out there as well, you know, so it's just saying that, you know, OK, you know, we understand that, you know, every content is not structured. But how can we give you a, you know, quick way out? Great. And, you know, now we're just towards the end of the presentation. I want to quickly write, so we, you know, I, you know, I was doing this talk in DrupalCon earlier, right? And, you know, and, you know, people, you know, are skeptical, right? That, you know, why it doesn't work. Just try different things, right? I said, when is DrupalCon? It gave me a feature stripper to say May 18 to 23, right? I was doing this in Florida DrupalCon and kept camp as well. When is Florida Drupal Camp? February 21st. I was, you know, when is Drupal 7 end of the life, right? It'll give you that date, November 2021, right? So you don't realize it. But for everything, Google is actually building a featured snippet or a position zero, if you will. The question is, are you going to come as a business in that future snippet or not? Right? If you're not, see earlier, you know, you had, like, you know, if you were in the top 10, you were fine, right? You were still getting a lot of traffic and business. But in the voice world, if you're not at the position zero, you're screwed, okay? Because that's the only answer that Google is going to give, right? On the voice world. So make sure that you invest in it, right? Another important thing, right? So my friend said, I was walking with him and he said, it doesn't work, right? As skeptical, like, you know, many people. And he said, okay, give me a question that you would think, you know, for people fitting at the Florida Technical College. And he said, okay, what is average tuition fees, right? And he knew that because he was from Florida Technical College. And I asked that question immediately to Google Assistant. And it gave me 29, 838 USD. It was right there, right? It was 29,700 something, what he was paying. And it was right, you know, in accurate, right? So imagine, like, we think that, okay, we don't get answers. But, you know, if the more we start using it, the more we would realize that, you know, it is very, very accurate in a lot of sense, right? Cool. You know, a few things. If you use, you know, HRF and, you know, SEMrush and other tools like this, I pulled this up from HRF. One quick thing would be just go in and look at questions which are more NLP centric. The keyword search that are coming on your website, which are more voice centric, more NLP centric. And you will realize that, you know, there is a lot of visits happening, right? So this is one of my clients, I picked it up, you know, and you will see that, you know, 300 searches, 350 searches, 250 searches, right? And these are happening, right? People are doing NLP centric searches, right? Even if you don't realize it, even if you're not optimizing content, the searches are happening out there, right? And some very complex search. What is an advantage to alternative energy technology? What is the advantage of solar energy, right? You would not even think that that's where NLP people are doing, right? What is that advantage of using the pyramid of energy? So people are doing NLP centric searches because that's how people talk, right? That is how naturally they talk, right? And more Gen Z, more, you know, as they will come in, that's what they expect Google to do, right? So optimize your search for natural language searches, right? That's one of the end, you know, and I'll not go into cane, but, you know, I probably can quickly talk about it. But so one of the things that, you know, I talk about, you started talking about recently is that, you know, that we realize what I'm realizing that, you know, when we start building this context and it is the bedrock of a personalization as well, right? If you want to give a personalized journey or a personalization, good personalization experience, context in the content extremely becomes important, right? Taxonomies, it starts from taxonomies, but it goes up to a very, very deep level, right? By defining a good field structure. And that's where I'm realizing that, you know, it's a good time to invest in a customer data platform, right? Because, you know, at one point when you realize that, you know, you've invested so much into context and content and if you don't have a customer view and a 360 degree view of a customer and saying that what that customer is doing onto multiple platforms at multiple channels, right? You're going to lose a, you know, a lot of historical data. So if you're not invested in a customer data platform and if you're not asked your customer to or asked your client to invest in a customer data platform, do that today. It's a very important piece. And lastly, this is something that we've been building, actually, internally at Stryjan. We're building a wife's first learning management system on purpose, right? You know, because the modern learner is, you know, very distractor, right? You know, Gen Z and, you know, I did the demo last time and, you know, on all this thing, but I'll not go into this, but we're building a wife's first learning management system and it's going to open force it soon, right? So that, you know, other people can use it as well.