Today we are shipping something we think will genuinely make the site easier to use: you can now search by voice. Click the small microphone icon on the homepage search bar, speak your search, and the transcript lands directly in the input. Hit Ask, and our AI assistant does the rest.

This is not a novelty feature. It is a real accessibility and speed improvement, and we want to talk about why we built it and who it helps before we get into how it works.

Who this actually helps

Most job seekers on JobAds.ca fall into one of three groups, and voice search materially improves the experience for all three:

  • People on the move or with their hands busy. If you are on a jobsite, in a truck, taking a coffee break with a hard hat still on, or somewhere your keyboard is not, voice search means you can look for your next role in about five seconds without pulling out a phone stand or wiping your hands off first. This is exactly the population we hear from most: skilled trades, transportation, healthcare workers on shift, folks who are already working and thinking about their next opportunity.
  • People whose typing is slower than their thinking. If you are more comfortable speaking than typing, or English is your second language and speaking flows more naturally, or you use assistive technology, or you just have big hands and a small phone, voice search removes a friction that has always been there. You should not have to be a fast typist to find work.
  • People who want the search to just understand them. Typing a long filtered search into a box, thinking about which words the site will recognize, tabbing through filter panels: it is all cognitive load. Speaking naturally ("I want to be a welder in Regina, or maybe Saskatoon") skips all of that. The search assistant handles the parsing so you can focus on the answer.

All three of these groups have told us, in feedback and in conversation, that they wanted a faster way in. So we built one.

What it means in practice

Here are the kinds of things you can now just say out loud on the homepage:

  • "Welder in Regina." You get welder jobs in Regina. Not a novel example, but this is what most searches actually look like, and it should be one press and two seconds of talking, not typing 15 characters and switching keyboards.
  • "Can I be a doctor in Regina?" gets doctor roles in Regina, with the search expanding automatically to include physician, family physician, and general practitioner postings you would not have found by typing "doctor" alone.
  • "I'm looking to be a trucker in Regina or Saskatoon or maybe Edmonton" pulls truck driver postings across all three cities in a single search, including Class 1 driver, commercial driver, and long-haul synonyms.
  • "My name's Nathan and I want to be a chef in Calgary." The assistant recognizes the self-introduction and searches for chef jobs in Calgary. No matter how conversationally you phrase it, the assistant tries to pick out just the job title and the location.

Before you hit Ask, you can see exactly what the assistant understood in the "I UNDERSTOOD" chip row. If something is off, you can correct it right there. No surprises when the results load.

How it works, briefly

  1. Click the microphone icon inside the homepage search bar.
  2. Speak your search. Recording stops on its own about a second after you finish, or when you click again, or at the 30-second cap.
  3. Your audio is sent to our speech-to-text partner and returns as text, which drops into the search bar exactly as if you had typed it.
  4. Our AI assistant parses the transcript into filters and shows results.

Why we partnered with Oruk AI

We looked at a few speech-to-text providers before choosing Oruk AI. What made them the right choice for us was two things:

  • Their model handles the way our users actually talk. Job seekers in Western Canada dictate short, colloquial searches with specific vocational vocabulary. "Is there a Class 1A gig in Yorkton?" is a real phrase that most generic models mangle. Oruk's transcription handled the phrasings and the trade-specific vocabulary accurately without needing us to reword our prompts.
  • Predictable pricing at our scale. Voice search is a nice-to-have feature that has to be affordable, or we cannot keep offering it for free to every visitor. Oruk was straightforward to reason about at the volumes we push.

Learn more about Oruk at oruk.ai.

Privacy notes

  • Voice search only records when you click the microphone. There is no always-on listening.
  • Silent clips are discarded on your device before anything is uploaded.
  • The audio is sent from our server directly to the transcription endpoint. We do not store audio recordings.
  • The transcript itself is treated like any other search: used to run the search, logged the same way typed searches are (title, city, wage). Nothing more.
  • Voice search is opt-in every time. If you never click the mic, we never send any audio anywhere.

Browser support

Voice search works on any browser that supports the standard MediaRecorder API: recent Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Android Chrome. If your browser does not support it, the microphone icon simply does not appear.

Where to try it

Open the homepage, click the microphone icon on the right side of the search bar, and speak. If you see the mic pulse red, it is listening. When it turns green briefly, it is transcribing. When it goes back to grey, your transcript is in the box and ready to send.

As always, if you have feedback (or the transcription got something colourfully wrong), we would love to hear it.

The team at JobAds Canada