Google To Introduce Voice Search on iPhone, Hopefully It Will Work

Have you ever thought about doing some really quick search on your cell phone when on the go to find some place or store nearby but thought it was too difficult (and not really quick) to type all the letters to get the answer to your quick question? I do believe the answer will be positive for many of us and now we have Google addressing this particular need on one particular phone - that is Apple’s iPhone.

New Your Times reports that Google has built an update to its search application for Apple iPhone that is promised to make its first appearance on Apple App Store for all the iPhone owners to download and start using as soon as this morning. A user of the new application will be able to ask the phone any question, after which the application will record the words and try to recognize the meaning so that Google’s search engine could provide an answer to the question.

The results will include both general results from the world wide web and also local results based on the user’s location determined using the iPhone GPS functionality - in case you are looking for the nearest subway station, for example.

It is understandable that the performance of the application will depend largely on the performance of the voice recognition technology it is based on. After all, if the question or a search phrase is poorly recognized, it is hard to provide any relevant results for such a query. New York Times’ John Markoff reports that Google’s application is more reliable than Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice service yet the portion of accurate results is still far from 100%.

But it is important to remember that users will also participate in improving the product’s performance as Google will be able to aggregate and analyze all the voice queries and polish up the voice recognition technology in the process. In fact, Google has already used data it accumulated when people used its GOOG-411 directory service to prepare voice search for iPhone. Besides, billion of queries all the internet users sent to Google search engine over the past years also helped as Google now often knows how word strings are usually built and can predict what a user wanted to say even if the words are not 100% clearly recognized.

But of course no one should expect the results to be 100% accurate as voice recognition is a very challenging technology. So it is quite possible that after trying to have the search engine understand what you have to say you will still need to type it on the touch screen anyway. But chances are it will understand you immediately and serve the results that will answer all your questions.

To me it is a little surprising that Google is rolling this application first for iPhone when it could make its debut on Android mobile operating system instead of adding some very appealing functionality to a competitive device. But anyway if you notice the application in the App Store this morning and want to give it a try on your iPhone, let us know what you think of its performance in the comments below.