Google to iPhoners: Talk to the App

A new feature for Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) iPhone search application that listens to spoken searches will be made available soon, according to the search company's iPhone application page.

At press time, the feature had not been rolled out through Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) online App Store, though The New York Times has reported it may come as early as Friday.

As it's currently available, Google's iPhone search app lets users type in search questions via the device's keyboard, and it delivers location-aware results. So users looking to find a local pizzeria can type in "pizza" and get the results mapped.

However, Google isn't just looking to help fill hungry iPhone user bellies. With the new feature, most any spoken question can return search results, making iPhone owners even faster masters of trivia. With the expected app, instead of tapping out "What is the speed of sound?" users can speak it. Typing will still be enabled, if the user prefers.

So what happens next? Is the iPhone powerful enough to translate trillions of human phrases?

As it turns out, the iPhone doesn't do the heavy lifting. It reportedly records the spoken phrase and uploads it to Google's servers, which then figure out the intent and generate the search -- incorporating location-specific information, too. (Hence the ability to offer up local pizzerias.)

The results are sent back to the iPhone and presented in an iPhone screen-friendly format.

Will It Work?

"I think that this is going to be a convenience -- and useful in selective situations, like in the car when people are driving, or when you have a very long query that's going to be too painful to type," Greg Sterling, principal analyst for Sterling Market Intelligence, told MacNewsWorld.

"It'll be convenient and efficient if the speech recognizers are good. GOOG-411 works much of the time, but it doesn't always work. There's variable accuracy, but they are getting better and better," he added.

GOOG-411 is Google's existing dial-up service that listens to voice queries looking for businesses and then connects users to their desired organizations. The results are limited to businesses, and the delivery of the answer is either a phone connection to the business or the results sent via a text message -- which can even include a link to a Google map.

Following Others

Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) both already have similar services available to mobile phone users. Yahoo's oneSearch with Voice currently only works with a few BlackBerry devices, but it also returns results for wide-open, anything-under-the-sun queries. Microsoft's Tellme also works with BlackBerry devices, but it only returns results relating to business listings. Looking for the nearest Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX)? No problem. Want to know the distance between the sun and Earth? Out of luck.

ChaCha offers a voice question-answer service for mobile phones, but it's not fully automated with speech recognition engines -- it uses knowledgeable human experts to answer questions and return results. It takes a few minutes to get results returned via a text message.

Speech's Limitations

Voice recognition applications, Sterling said, are getting better and better all the time -- and Google's vast processing power and worldwide reach could help it make increasing gains in voice recognition accuracy.

Still, will this change the world of search?

"It's not going to be transformative -- not the killer app. You certainly can't use it in the situation where there's a lot of background noise, like a restaurant or crowded area," Sterling said.

The Google Mobile App is free for the iPhone, but the results it delivers are already starting to show specially formatted ads.

"If you see the newly formated pages, you get fewer ads, but they are more prominent," Sterling said.

Google will very likely deliver an Android-based solution in the future, but as Sterling noted, "the iPhone is really where all the action is right now in mobile."