Google goes big on voice search

Posted by David Walker on Mon 6 Apr 2009

Talk rather than text is the future

Google has been busy improving its voice search apps over the last few months. And for good reason - according to the company's vice president of engineering, voice search 'is core' to the search giant's business.

That's the view of Vic Gundotra, who was speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. And with the latest apps for both iPhone and BlackBerry, Google is starting to show that voice search goes beyond mere novelty. Commenting on the technology, he said: 'Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it's amazing. It's working. It's reached a tipping point. It's growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it.'

Voice search has certainly been a tough nut to crack for Google. The company first experimented by using phone calls, but as results were only available via PCs, the service was scrapped. It returned for mobiles in 2008, but this time suffered initially by a failure to fully understand accents. According to Mr Gundotra, 'It's one of those technologies we think gets better with usage. We launched it on the iPhone and have seen a 15% jump in accuracy because, as more people use it, we collect more data and our accuracy gets better.'

We recently used the BlackBerry version and the accuracy was better than we expected, but still not perfect. Saying that, with just a few more refinements, it really could save an awful lot of fingerwork.

At Web 2.0, Google also revealed it was close to launching a web-based version of Gmail for both iPhone and G1 using HTML 5 and would also be offering a suite of offline apps using the same language. Google's engineering VP obviously loves it: 'We are going to be leaders in taking advantage of HTML 5,' he said.

And finally, some good news for Mac owners - Google is working flat out to bring the Chrome browser to Macs. Sadly, that's all he gave out, with no firm date available for its launch.

Link: Google (via BBC)

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