Craft Focus - Feb/Mar (Issue 71)

126 craft focus Back in the 1980s, I worked for an engineering company that made precision parts for trains, helicopters and all sorts of high-tech, extremely secretive military projects. All this technical wizardry was created by a CNC machining centre that was programmed using a punched paper tape machine, allied with a green screen computer system with less processing power than the average modern watch. How things have changed. Nowadays, smartphones have more processing power than the supercomputers used by NASA to land men on the moon, and the devices we use are only getting smarter every year. These are fed by enormous amounts of freely available data, AI systems and hugely powerful multi-core processors. Now we all face a life dominated by AI- driven voice-activated search, things can never go back to what they were. If you want people to find your website using voice command search technologies, read on. Optimising for voice search Before the development of voice-activated search, the keyphrases we all put into search engines tended to be driven by the technologies of the time – keyboard input in most cases. This means keyphrases tended to get truncated as humans adapted to the way David Fairhurst gives us a crash course in voice search engine optimisation speech therapy