Calling All Searchers

Hat tip to Dario Bonacina at the New Blog Times for a report on Vic Gundotra’s remarks at the Web 2.0 expo on Google’s migration to voice activated searches, which would be a killer app for mobile phones.

According to a report on CNET: Mobile is central to Google’s work. The company already offers a search application for the iPhone and some other models that lets people issue queries by speaking rather than just typing. The accuracy of the speech recognition has improved 15 percent in the last quarter, Gundotra said, and usage of the service is growing fast.

Gundotra previously worked at Microsoft, but it was a few words from his then 4-year-old daughter that led him to Google. He’d told a friend he didn’t know the answer to a question, and his daughter, overhearing, asked him, “Daddy, where’s your phone?”

“In her brief four years of life, she assumed any time you didn’t know the answer to a question, you brought out your phone. For her the phone was the ultimate answering machine,” something that answered questions. That helped him realize that Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information and presenting it to people would happen in mobile phones, too.

Pundits are sceptical. I’ve been hearing about voice dictation for almost twenty years. According to the BBC:

Early iterations that worked best with North American accents had problems understanding other accents, including British. BBC technology cCorrespondent Rory Cellan-Jones reported in November last year that his attempts to use it were “pure gibberish”.

For example, his query about the next train, West Ealing to Paddington “delivered some useful information about ‘neck strain’ – but no train times”.

There are a lot of players in this space – not surprisingly, since it will make the phone the default browser for many. Here is Yahoo last week. The Nuance announcement six weeks ago was interesting:

Nuance Communications’ Nuance Voice Control (NVC) 2.0 reportedly enables speech for any service on any mobile device from smartphones to feature phones.

NVC functions include:

– Voice activated dialing: “Call Mom’s mobile”
– Free-form Web search: “Find tickets to Red Sox game.”
– Text or email message addressing and dictation: “Send text to Kate Smith; Hey Kate, Let’s meet at the lobby bar in 20 minutes and then go to the concert.”
– Music search: “Get Love Story by Taylor Swift”
– Navigation: “Find Directions to 159 Newbury Street , Boston , Massachusetts ”
– Games: “Go to BubbleSmile”
– Social media applications: “Go to Twitter”
– And any other feature or service operators and OEMs want to voice enable.