Google Adds Search by Voice to iPhone

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

The ability to recognize just about any phrase from any person has long been the supreme goal of artificial intelligence researchers looking for ways to make man-machine interactions more natural. Systems that can do this have recently started making their way into commercial products.

As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.

“We are dramatically increasing value to the advertiser through location and voice,” said Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries.

Several weeks ago Adobe added voice recognition technology developed by Autonomy, a British firm, to its Creative Suite software, allowing it to generate transcripts of video and audio recordings with a high degree of accuracy.

Mr. Gundotra said Google had been tackling the twin problems of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.

“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” he said.

The new iPhone search capability is not the first speech offering from Google. In March, it announced that GOOG-411, an experimental directory information service, had turned into a real product. The service allows users to ask for business phone and address information. The company said it had built on its experience and the data it collected through GOOG-411 in developing the iPhone service.

Google recently published a technical paper on building large models for machine translation of language. The researchers wrote that they had trained the system on two trillion “tokens,” or words.

Article courtesy of NY Times

Sure would be nice to not have to type all those search queries, wonder if this will changes the results and SEO. What do you think?