Mary Meeker: Voice and image searches are going to make up at least half of all searches by 2020

By Johana Bhuiyan@JMBooyah Jun 1, 2016, 12:42pm EDt

Hands-free computing is old news. In the next five years, it's going to be all about hands- and vision-free computing, according to Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker.

By 2020, voice- and image-based searches are going to make up at least 50 percent of all searches, Meeker told a crowd of tech executives Wednesday at this year's Code Conference, citing Baidu's chief scientist, Andrew Ng.

Today, people are already using voice to perform tasks, typically when their hands or eyes are otherwise occupied. In fact, as of June 2015, Siri received more than one billion speech requests a week.

But that also means that the lines between being connected and being offline are even more blurred. As speech-to-text technology improves, more people are using voice assistant features on their smartphone. In 2015, 65 percent of smartphone owners surveyed were using their voice assistants. As of May 2016, one in five searches on Android devices were voice-based searches.