Mobile voice search: Android’s killer app?

Friday, December 4th, 2009

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.

(more…)