I find this absolutely fascinating when I compare it to my personal experience. It begs the question: how frequently does the average person Google something compared to power users? I consider myself to have above average googling skills, and I'm a developer so there's obviously a lot of documentation searching regularly, but even excluding all of that I surely perform a good 10-20 non-programming searches a day and it could easily be an order of magnitude more if I'm actively researching something.

Does the average user perform significantly less searches, and so the novelty or occasional voice search moves the needle 20%, or are they performing as many searches as me but using voice for many of them. I personally only ever found voice search useful for things that are more like questions and not research ("how old is _______" is a classic example) so I find it difficult to believe the latter. The former would be quite the revelation though because I always assumed _everyone_ googled as much as I do but it seems that might not be the case.

I rarely use google outside of work. At home, I have a few regular sites I keep up with, I know the URLs and I just type them in.

The article says that it is 20% of mobile searches. I doubt many people are doing very lengthy research mobile. I have seen siri and okgoogle being used pretty commonly for mobile searching. I'd be interested to see how many searches happen on mobile vs desktop though.

I would also be interested in seeing if people looking for places/directions factors into this in some way.

I thought the same, then visited family who use it constantly and it all made sense.