Google's iPhone mobile app - still speechless

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 16 November 2008 13:14

IT Industry - Market

Google’s “Mobile App” for iPhone was meant to get an upgrade allowing iPhone users to search Google by voice, with the New York Times reporting it would come “as soon as” last Friday – but so far, Google’s mobile app remains speechless.

Google’s mobile app for iPhone has been around now for several months, delivering Google’s search engine in more intuitive way than simply typing a query into Safari’s search box or that on google.com.

While the app is free and is popular, the last few days has seen much interest in a heavily touted new feature: voice recognition letting you speak your requests instead of typing them.

The feature is enabled in an updated version of the Google Mobile App, which is surprisingly still not available after a few days of promotion, that existing users will rush to download as soon as Apple decides to let Google's voice search app speak for itself.

It works by recording your voice and sending it to Google’s servers, transcribing your voice by software into text and feeding the results into Google’s search engine. The results are displayed on your iPhone’s screen, with the entire operation supposedly taking only mere seconds – provided you are on a 3G network or connected to WiFi.

This suggests the software works just fine on 2G iPhones as well, but will simply take a few seconds longer thanks to the slower nature of 2G mobile data networks.

How accurate the software is in noisy environments is yet to be seen, and no doubt there will be stories of Google’s voice app displaying results for words that sound curiously similar to your spoken words but are inaccurate, although Google will naturally continue improving its software no matter what the initial reaction ends up being.

Although Google’s iPhone page was promoting the app, with a video showing how to use it, that promotion and video have mysteriously disappeared.

Conspiracy theorists have wondered whether Apple has been offended by Google’s brazen pre-publicity of an app not yet available to download, or if it has its own speech recognition app on the way, while others simply suggest Apple simply hasn’t yet approved the app for download.

A still-available video of the service in action and more information is on page 2, please read on.