One of the biggest sources of new searches in the coming years for Google will come from mobile devices, which is why it is attacking mobile on multiple fronts—with Android phones, mobile apps, and mobile search across multiple devices. One of its more impressive efforts lately has been around voice search. Not every phone has a touchscreen or a full keyboard, and some languages simply aren’t keyboard-friendly, and that is where voice search comes in extra handy.
Google already has impressive voice search capabilities on the iPhone, Android, and other phones in English. But today, it is extending voice search to Mandarin Chinese and to Nokia S60 series phones. There are so many different accents and nuances to spoken Chinese, which is the most popular language in the world, that getting the speech-to-text good enough to return relevant searches is a huge challenge.
I don’t speak Chinese so I can’t evaluate how good a job Google does with Chinese voice search (perhaps some of our readers who know Mandarin can give it a whirl and tell us their impressions in comments). But I am starting to use Google’s English voice search, even though I have an iPhone. The speech recognition in English is surprisingly good.
For instance, just this weekend, driving around Bedford, NY, I remembered that Richard Gere has an inn and restaurant up there, but couldn’t remember the name. Typing in “Richard Gere restaurant” into the Google Maps app on the iPhone returned nothing, so I closed that and clicked on the Google Mobile Apps icon. When I selected search, it encouraged me to try Voice Search. Maybe it always did that, but it was the first time I had noticed it. Already frustrated at that point and not wanting to retype my query, I tried saying “richard gere restaurant.” Sure enough, it understood me and delivered The Bedford Post Inn and Restaurants as the first result.
If Google can get its Chinese language voice search to be that good, China could become its largest source of mobile search queries.
S60 phones are not older, they are new and newer phones are coming out and existing ones are being sold at good pace than Techcrunch would expect!!
Btw, S60 phones already have Vlingo app, which does a voice search in google(which may not be exactly same as google’s own voice search), voice notes and voice contact calling for free, plus few more extra voice things with its paid app.
umm
Btw, just learnt that the new Google Voice search mobile app works with S60v3(non-touchscreen) so far, not compatible with S60v5(touch screen) yet.
So at this point, my Vlingo app will be enough for me for my Nokia 5800.
That is a really hard and excellent good job for google. As a Chinese, I could know how hard it will be, because for chinese, there is so many words in the same voice. Also when the tones are different, then the words are different, too. Moreover, for the same word, there is so many different meaning in different envrionment.
I don’t see anything hard about recognizing “One Moo Goo Gai Pan stir fly!!! Fai nai tee nai !”
Hahahahaha!
Voice recognition will sooner or later be a standard feature for cell phones.
If it’s not applicable to Chinese, I highly doubt if it will work for any other language.
Nice post, thanks very much. It is really a great process for google in cellphones.
So was Richard Gere’s restaurant any good?!
Why don’t TC uncover the massive overcharging for Adwords that Google is currently doing. They are charging over $250 to users credit cards when the Adwords dashboard only calculates $31 in click use.
It is amazing that the one thing that Google use to makes it’s revenue there is no phone support for. So they are stealing money from people hoping they never see these glitch charges.
But of course TC will never dare report on your good old pals at Google on this that you are getting so many “tips” about.
I manage some large Google PPC accounts and have not seen any discrepancies like that. Also it might be due to the size of my accounts but i have full phone support with no problem if i ever did have such an issue.
I think Mandarin is the simplest of the language you can do speech-to-text and vice versa easily because of the fixed rules of pronunciation and accentuation. So for me it seems easier the conversion between speech and pinyin text than converting between speech and English text.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to convert between pinyin(meaningless without a full sentence) and Chinese characters(meaningful).
For example pinyin’s ‘gong’(with first accentuation) can match both å·¥, 宫, å…¬ and 功 (similar spelling and accentuation) but those words have completely different meanings(work, palace, common and achievement respectively).
I wonder how they handle such difficulties !
You’re full of it.
*slaps Theodore on the back of head*
shenjingbing!!!!!
I think Google will win because they are the best at everything
It will be interesting to see what the ever progressive Nokia marketing guys end up selling in China. In Iran the deal included mass population monitoring software – leading to delightful population repression opportunities for that lawful state, regime, or collection of thugs (depending on your sensibilities). Here’s a clip of a typical day to day activities for an average Iranian woman, following the Nokia-Siemens-Network deal: http://www.yout...h?v=f5s4iXeQOkE
(needless to say Nokia remains unpopular in Iran)