Google Voice Search Available for iPhone

Put your communicator to your ear, ask a question and the computer answers. Sounds like a typical day for an intrepid starship explorer. But today you're the explorer, the communicator is your iPhone and the computer is Google Voice Search. And it's here now.



Google has announced that its new voice search will be available to iPhone users as early as today. The application will be free of charge and will be downloadable from the iPhone App Store. It will be made available to other platforms in the future. Frankly, we're a little surprised that it isn't available for the T-Mobile G1, which runs on Google's Android system.

Using the iPhone's accelerometer, the device knows when it's put to your ear. From there simply as a question in plain language. You'll get a voice response to your question or can have a text message sent to your phone. Some responses will contain local content. Knowing the location of the caller using the phone's GPS function, questions like "where is the nearest movie theater?" can be answered with relevant information. If the query results in finding a business, you'll simply be able to tell the phone to complete a call to it with no need to know the number. Google believes that this location based feature will translate into higher priced ad rates.

This is not Google's first effort at voice recognition. For some months we've been able to call GOOG-411 and speak a request to locate a business. Users can choose to receive a text message response or even to receive a map and driving directions on their cell phone. In July, BlackBerry Pearl users were afforded an experimental opportunity to use voice search to locate businesses using the Google map view of their location.

Speech recognition is far from perfect and Google admits that sometimes the response to an inquiry is gibberish; but, this is artificial intelligence at work. The more it's used, the better it will get at recognizing the way people ask questions in real life and the better the responses will become. Google may be in a position to leverage the gazillions of searches that people make on their service into the next indispensible tool.

Check out our reviews of the best smartphones, including the iPhone, and don't forget these other blog posts (simply say "Blog Home" to activate voice recognition navigation ... not really):

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