Google invited us to its London HQ last night for a peek at what it’s up to on the mobile side of the business.

One of the features mobile product manager, Hugo Barra, was particularly proud of was voice search. Using Motorola’s spiffing-looking Droid phone, he showed us how he could dictate even reasonably complex search terms. Phrases such as “pictures of President Obama at the G8 summit” were flawlessly transcribed and producing search results within a couple of seconds – far faster than anyone could reasonably hope to tap out the same phrase using the onscreen keyboard.

All very impressive, and even more so considering that Barra hadn’t gone through an elaborate training procedure to help the phone recognise his accent. All the transcribing is performed on Google’s servers, where the software can call on a huge library of accents and contextual data to help it achieve such impressive levels of accuracy.  Far more data than could be squeezed on to a phone handset.

Which set me thinking. I’ve recently bought an iPhone 3GS, and one of the first apps I downloaded was a Google App that contained a voice search feature, which I’d casually ignored on the assumption that it was bound to be pants. But if the Android phone is doing all this clever stuff in the cloud, surely the iPhone app would also be using the same service as Google’s own operating system?

So I gave the iPhone voice search a crack. And blow me down, it’s absolutely magnificent.

I dictated the exact same Obama phrase as Barra, and achieved exactly the same perfect result, even though my Essex brogue is a million miles away (well, about 5,000 miles away) from Barra’s American accent.

It handled other complex terms adeptly:

“Pound dollar exchange rate”

“Dannii Minogue on the X-Factor”

“Bear Stearns”

“The weather in Burgess Hill”

“PC Pro A-List”

All transcribed perfectly, and all delivering the required information immediately, or a click away as the top search result.

To be fair, it struggled slightly with Stuart Turton’s Scouse drawl (“Bear Stearns” became “birthstones”) but, frankly, I’ve been working with him for two years and I still struggle to understand him.

So Google has indeed produced a wonderful mobile app. It just hasn’t produced a reason to switch to Android.