Speech Recognition
Turning spoken words into text. It underpins voice search, dictation and call transcription, and it now handles accents and background noise far better than it used to.
Related terms
Query Fan-Out
When an assistant turns one question into several searches behind the scenes, then combines what it finds. It means your page can be pulled into an answer about a question you never targeted.
AI Overviews
The written summary Google now places above its search results, assembled from several pages and citing a few of them. Appearing inside one can bring visitors; being left out of one can quietly cost you the clicks you used to get.
Answer Box
A boxed answer at the top of a results page, lifted from one page and credited to it. Winning one usually means having answered the question plainly and early rather than burying it.
AI Policy Page
A public page stating how a business uses AI and what it does with customer data. Increasingly expected, and cheap to write honestly.
Vector Database
A database built to store embeddings and find the closest matches quickly. It is the part of an AI search system that decides which of your pages is relevant to a question.
Inference
The moment an AI actually answers, as opposed to when it was trained. Training happens once and costs a fortune; inference happens every time somebody asks, and is what you pay for per use.