Android News
Google releases a series of videos that illustrate the power of Voice Search
September 15, 2010 | by Lars Aronsson
Android Apps, Tips, Tools, Videos
Google’s Voice Search is a powerful tool, but it can be somewhat difficult to know how to best take advantage of its functionality. Even though Google has excellent tutorials for both voice search and voice actions, the company wants to further promote speech-to-text with a series of videos that show a variety of situations when Voice Search may come in handy.
According to the Google Mobile Blog, one in every four searches from an Android phone in the US is by voice. Google points out that voice search works much better than typing in certain situations: it’s faster on phones with small screens, you can perform a search even though you don’t know the correct spelling, it’s safer when you’re walking around and more fun and social. The two voice search videos below involve the Nexus One, and there are more clips at Google Mobile’s YouTube channel.
We recently did a tutorial for mastering search on Android, and here’s our post about Voice Actions.
Google Search by Voice: Sink
Google Search by Voice: Foosball
ok.. a reasonable ad. Next step, answers spoken. Clearly that is going to take some effort for accuracy based on actual desire. Perhaps that's why Google records SO much info on us… to make OUR searches all that more perfect.
My recent post Why Steve Jobs Wears Black NINJA!
The app Edwin tries to do spoken replies, and it's got a good cool factor, but the fact is, it's quite inefficient. It takes 1/10th the time to read the time or whatever than to wait for the speech.
the use case for the spoken reply is to let you multitask. if you're shaving or something and can't look at the screen right away, a spoken response gets you the information you need faster and doesn't interrupt what you are currently doing.
Two Bad eye need two ee-NUN-C-ate when eye speek in two my Frooyoo. keep trYING google.
Sorry Max. It would take more computing power than you could possibly put in a phone (at this time) to handle all accents and ways of pronouncing and slurring words. If you offer a computer too many choices, it can’t differentiate with out increasing the amount of calculation exponentially. It’s just physics, dude. Even Dragon, running on a quad-core processor, isn’t perfect. Then you add background noise… Be patient. In the meantime, learning to enunciate will improve your general communication skills. (Or should that be skilz?)
agh! I honestly can't watch the foosball video. STOP SPINNING!!!
I dumped Edwin – I prefer both Google Voice and Vlingo