It's not uncommon to see someone speaking into their smartphone. But look a little closer, and you may find they're just chatting with a virtual assistant instead of another human being.

Google today released a report on the voice search habits of Americans, many of whom talk to their phones while watching TV, and wish voice search could help find the lost remote.

"Voice search is a key feature of the Google app that's becoming even more important as people spend more time on their mobile phones," Scott Huffman, Google's Vice President for Conversational Search, said in a statement. "We wanted to learn more about how people of all ages use Google hands-free on their phones."

The Mobile Voice Study asked 1,400 participants to explain how, where, and why they use Google's own Search app, as well as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana.

Unsurprisingly, a majority of teens (55 percent) call upon the service every day—a figure that grows to 75 percent among those 13 to 18 years old, who use their phones 11-plus hours per day.

Folks tend to turn to voice search to ask for directions, dictate a text message, make a phone call, look up a recipe, or check the weather. Others use it "just for fun," Google's survey said—be it in front of the TV or while in the bathroom.

"We found that for teens, voice search comes as naturally as checking social media and they're getting very creative about how (and where) they use it," Huffman said.

Popular among the younger crowd, many adults feel a level of self-consciousness when talking to their phone, admitting to "feeling like a geek."

Still, two-thirds of respondents think voice search is cool, and nearly as many say they feel tech-savvy when using it. And the general consensus among all age groups is that hands-free voice search will be "very common in the future"; 89 percent of adults and 85 percent of teens agree.

Just what that future holds remains unclear: Teenagers would be satisfied if their phone could "send me pizza," while more pragmatic adults wish they could ask their handset to "tell me where my keys are." Even better: Locate the TV remote.

"The study gives us great ideas about new ways we could help people," Huffman said.

Check out Google's full results in the infographic below.

The tech giant's voice search function recently beat out competitors Siri and Cortana in the Stone Temple Consulting Corporation's study. Based on the showdown, Google Now (which is encompassed within the Google Search app) returns twice as many results as Cupertino's service, and nearly three times that of Cortana.

PCMag recently put Google Search app and Google Now to the test; check out the results in the slideshow above. Also see our own analysis of Cortana vs. Google Now vs. Siri, and take our quiz to see which service your personality best matches.