50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 (comScore)
Misquoted Confidence: high
Primary source found, but the way it is quoted changes the subject, metric, population or precision.
- Commonly cited as
- "comScore: 50% of searches will be voice by 2020"
- True origin
- Andrew Ng (then Baidu chief scientist), interview in Fast Company — Inside Baidu's Plan To Beat Google By Taking Search Out Of The Text Era (Sept. 17, 2014)
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- 2014 (prediction)
- Data as of
- Prediction from 2014
- Last checked
- What the source says
At the moment, around 10% of Baidu search queries are done by voice ... Ng forecasts that "in five years time at least 50% of all searches are going to be either through images or speech."
- Method & sample
- A personal forecast in an interview, about Baidu search in China; no data.
- Drift between quote and source
- Attribution: credited to comScore, which says it never published it
- Subject: 'images or speech', rewritten as voice only
- Scope: Baidu/China, applied to all search
- Type: a 2014 forecast quoted as fact
- Interest
- n/a
Safe rephrasing
The '50% voice by 2020' figure traces to a 2014 forecast by Baidu's Andrew Ng that half of searches would use images or speech within five years; it was never a comScore finding.
Sources we opened
Machine-readable: /api/claims/50-percent-searches-voice-by-2020.json · Last checked 2026-10-16