Google adds voice search to iPhone, a few days late

You are here: Home > News > Mobile Phones > Google adds voice search to iPhone, a few days late

Google adds voice search to iPhone, a few days late

News Categories

News Archive

RSS Feed

By Peter White (Thursday, 20th November 2008)

Of course, one of the fun things about new spellcheck, voice recognition or predictive text applications is trying to catch them out, getting comedy results in the process. But considering the iPhone's second best market is the UK, Google might have done well to improve recognition of British accents in its new, and much hyped, voice activated search function for the Apple device.

Cor blimey, luv a duck, apples and pears, oo-ar me lover, I got a bran' noo combine 'arvester, waye aye like man, eee by gum - none of these are recognised.

Google grabbed headlines last week when it released its anticipated voice-enabled search for the iPhone, but then the application failed to turn up in the App Store for several days. It is now there though, and can be downloaded for free under the name Google Mobile App 0.3.142, either directly to the iPhone or via iTunes. Google gave no reason for the delay, which frustrated many eager users.

After launching the application, users just need to wait for a tone, then speak normally into the iPhone with their search words and phrases. In US tests, these were recognized correctly about 80% of the time not bad for a speech recognition function, but potentially still quite annoying, especially in a noisy environment.

However, UK testers found that the voice recognition software apparently has problems with non-American accents, with a search for 'iPhone' throwing up a range of wrong answers, such as 'Einstein' and 'kitchen sink', while many early users reported 'fish' being wrongly recognized as 'sex', which is worrying when you consider a younger user might get a hold of your iPhone.

Of course, recognition software improves as the database builds, but Google's promotional video, which depicts people with Chinese, Irish and English accents using the program problem-free, may be over-optimistic for now.

The new version also adds Google's 'Search with My Location' enhancement, which was announced in September and uses the handset's GPS location awareness features to narrow searches.