Well, it happened. Google’s voice recognition mobile app finally arrived today on the iPhone App Store. Until today all we had to go by was the demo video that Google created showing it in action.
And that video shows something that quite simply changes the way I’d use the phone. Instead of clicking buttons on the virtual keyboard to search the web or my contacts, I’d just hit a button and use the Google Mobile App. And it really is just one button – it knows, via the accelerometer, when you put the phone to your ear and when you take it away. Voila! Cool stuff happens.
Here’s the video, narrated by Mike LeBeau on the Google Mobile team:
Let’s compare that video to my actual results. First, the big letdown is that you can’t search contacts by voice – you have to type for that, and it’s not really worth using the app just to do that when the normal contact application works just as well.
Also, it’s important that there is very little background noise when you use the app. A steady hum from an electric heater six feet away from me confounded the app on speakerphone. The noise from a car, certainly, will prohibit speakerphone usage while driving. The results below were done in a silent room with the phone held up to my ear, and I spoke as clearly as I am able. The demo results are shown on the left, my actual results are on the right.
First query: Pictures of the Golden Gate bridge at sunset: Results were perfect.
Second Query: How big is a giant squid?: Crazy results – I got “public citizen times square”
Third Query: Movie Showtimes: Results were perfect, and it used my location
25 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit: Results were perfect
The contact search also went exactly as the video showed, but it’s a little misleading. You can’t search contacts by voice, only by typing. The video shows that, but by that point you’re all hopped up on voice goodness and you don’t really realize that its all typing at that point, which is little better than using the normal contact app that comes with the phone.
Overall, other than the one snafu with the giant squid, everything went well. But the voice recognition is far from perfect, as the demo video suggests. And the limitation on contact search is a letdown.
Not perfect yet but I’ll be using it tomorrow.
So… what accents does it take?
Apparently it works best with ‘North American’ accents.
apparently it isn’t available outside of the US?
Sure it is. I’m using it from Norway right now.
I downloaded it this morning in DE just fine.
The settings page says (translated in german): Voice Search works only in english, especially american english.
Yeah right, that pretty much sucks! Loses a lot of potential here at Germany.
I will try it out with my brazilian ascent and let’s see if it will work out. I will post updates.
its available here in the UK
A rumor floating around is that the delay was caused because Apple pulled the plug on voice contact search.
Makes perfect sense, delayed due to vocie contact search
If that is the case, then why is Say Who Dialer available? This does contact search through voice recognition… And worked pretty well when I tested it.
You’re right, Richard. Say Who is a voice dialer that requires no training or voice tags. Speak any name (entire name, first only, last only, even nicknames) or a phone number. Say Who will dial your selected contact for you. We’ve been available for almost a month on the App Store, and users think the speech reco works well. http://phobos.a...548215&mt=8
I can confirm I downloaded it in London
Looking fwd to check if it accepts a strong german accent as well :-)
It’s good to go in the UK, just been checking out here, great to have a one stop shop for all the Google stuff. Screenshot here http://bit.ly/1TS – It’s not perfect though..
There are still a lot of rumours that the technology still isnt working properly.
It works in switzeralnd
i think what’s important here is to realize that this is a relatively new concept (at least for me)! Must applaud the way they’re sending the data back-and-forth and then extracting what you really meant and then searching… very interesting.
Is this a novel idea or has someone integrated search and voice like this before?
I’m excited to try this out. I remember evaluating voice search products at Yahoo Mobile several years ago (back when we were handily beating Google in mobile search) and the technology just didn’t work yet. It was funny/sad to go through all the demos, because the vendors couldn’t get a good wireless connection inside and couldn’t get it quiet enough outside. We rarely saw a successful query.
There was also a problem that I remember coming up in market testing at both Yahoo and Vodafone: people feel dumb talking to their phone. It’s especially bad when it doesn’t do what you ask and you have to keep repeating yourself. IVR call centers have the, but it’s somehow more embarrassing when people know you’re subjecting yourself to it.
I’m hoping that both technology and social norms have progressed, because I’d love to search for local listings while driving around town.
It knows when you put the phone to your ear not via accelerometer but via a sensor that is next to a upper speaker. How would accelerometer recognize if I put it to my ear or just shake it?
Soon, Google’ll display ad in the street because he hears the conversation between two persons.
This app is just a way to test the precision of their voice recognition system.
How does it work? Does it do the voice recognition on the handset itself, or does it upload the sounds to google which runs the analysis in it’s big cloud? Quite important wrt data traffic (and possibly privacy).
A giant squid is about 50 foot just like our name :)
We’re going to open social shopping service with Myspcae.com
Our website is http://www.nextsearch.co.kr
We developed Visual shopping engine such as Like.com.
it is a great app, no doubt in my mind. but, it doesn’t actually run proper for the non North American accents. i got 2 results right out of 5 searches. and the rest were hilarious. for how tall is mount Everest i got hulk hogan and Denver mall. did anybody listened to the sounds it makes when the voice is being processed ?
Isn’t that just a copy of what the tellme guys have been doing? what happened to tellme post MSFT acquisition?
Worked perfect for me!
I wasn’t too impressed with the speech recognition at first. But if you tap on the green highlighted result you get a drop-down with other guesses it made.. and it has almost always had the correct wording somewhere in the list.
It’s not using the accelerometer to know when you’re holding it to your ear… it’s using the same method the phone uses to dim the screen when you’re holding it to your ear.
Yes, but it did understand “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. I was impressed by that.
Watch me test google’s voice search. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/naPSjWHoS9_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Watch me test google’s voice search. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/HhqbMtOIpF”}}}
VingTalk’s app for the iphone will be ready by December! You will be able to send GROUP voice and text messages!
Check out the start-up’s website:
http://www.vingtalk.com/cpp
All of the problems here are the standard voice recognition problems that have vexed voice recognition programs for years.
According to IBM researchers, who have been working on this problem for like 30 years, English is a terrible language for voice recognition. They said that if we all spoke Turkish, it would be a lot easier for the software. :-).
Cheers,
- Bill
works like 10% 0f the time for my Australian accent….bit of a let down. I guess its a Nth Amerrrrrrican app for now.
It does not seem to work when you do not have 3G service. I tried using it on EDGE and it would never come back with my search terms. I connected it to WiFi and it worked perfectly every time. Not sure if this is a bug or a limitation to the voice data sent.
I’ve been waiting for a voice search app to show up.
This looks awesome! Did anyone tried it on the iTouch yet?
Hi,
I download the app from the swiss app store…the voice recognition seems to be missing!!! Is this US only?
Have you looked in the settings, the UK version required Voice Search to be turned on
This is primarily for ADavidovits, if you are reading this: would love to chat more about your voice search experience , and any other things of interest.
this is great innovation in technology! You probably need to have clear voice to be easily recognized by the phone.
i loaded the app, worked as advertised BUT i can swear it found my contact info when i spoke my name into it. it even brought up my friend dino’s contact info. i managed to bring up various contact names & make calls that 1st night after install. the next day i wanted to show off to co-workers & i coudn’t duplicate it. i goes right into the browser/internet, no longer the contact list.
my mistake, the app that dialed my contact was the iphone ’say who lite dialer & maps’ not google mobileapp.
I’ve always like this app and like the improvements made. I thought with the improved voice recognition, the voice search would be better. I voice searched for my blog, “The iCrazee Mac Blog” and the searches it looked for were the following:
yakety yak blog
thai crazy mac blog
the height crazy mayer blog
yeah i crazy mac blog
e i crazy mac blog
It seems the voice recognition works best with single words. See my complete review on my blog.