Google’s had a dedicated search application for the iPhone for a while now, but the long-rumoured voice-recognition update has belatedly arrived in iTunes after a few hiccups last week. If you haven’t tried it yet I’d strongly recommend it as a way to pass a dull few hours – it’s livened up my morning no end.

Now, it’s important to realise that this isn’t a high-end dictation program, with training exercises to improve its accuracy and accomodate regional accents.

It’s just a basic free app, created and (we assume) trained in-house by Google’s Californian engineers – when enabling the feature you’re even warned it works best for “North American English accents”. It doesn’t speak Geordie yet, then.

To use it, you simply load up the app, hold the phone to your ear and wait for the beep, then speak. Over on the Google site you can watch a video of engineer Mike LeBeau searching for such long-winded examples as “pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset”, and getting a perfectly recognised search result in seconds. Expecting the worst, I tried that one myself to begin with – in my best Saarf Lahndon accent, of course – and, amazingly, it actually worked.

They must have specifically used that phrase while training it, I thought, so I tried some of my own search terms, and the results were more mixed. Terms along similar lines to LeBeau’s worked pretty well – “what’s the population of London”, “what’s the capital of India” – but try anything more complex and the app has all the usual flaws of such a basic voice recognition system.

Separating words is an issue – “magazine sales” will be “magazines ales” if you speak too quickly – while many technical terms predictably flummoxed it entirely. Waving goodbye to my dignity (as if talking to my iPhone, Quantum Leap-style, wasn’t undignifying enough), I even took Google’s advice and tried the same terms in my best Bill & Ted surfer dude voice with little more success.

Suffice it to say you’ll only get a high hit rate if you limit your use to general queries on well known, and simply named, topics. It also takes a few seconds to process the audio and bring up a result, so for all but those comedy moments in the pub we’ll pretty much stick to typing if it’s alright by Google.

Thankfully, there’s a second feature that’s potentially more useful, and adds to the appeal of the voice search. Google’s MyLocation technology has also been integrated into the app, so it can use the GPS locator in your iPhone to localise your search results.

So ask it for “Pizza Hut” and as well as the usual homepage it’ll throw up the details for the nearest branches to you at that moment. Opt for something more generic like “Indian food” and you’ll get a list of the nearest curry houses, with addresses, phone numbers and links to Google Maps.

Combined with the voice search it’s actually a very quick way to get basic but useful results relevant to your surroundings when you’re out and about, and it’s in this sense that the innovative Google Search app should be approached.

It’s not perfect, and it won’t replace simple typing for the vast majority of searches – standing in HMV and reciting items to compare online prices will certainly earn you a stare or two. But it’s a start, it’s free and it means you can now find your nearest chicken bhuna in seconds. That’s progress.