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Google Voice Search May be Coming Soon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the nothing-like-idle-speculation dept.

vitaly.friedman writes "The master of text-based search could be looking to lend a voice to Internet users everywhere, or so it appears based on Google's latest patent. Patent #7,027,987, issued today by the US Patent and Trademark Office, covers a 'Voice interface for a search engine.'"

5 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Voice Matching by UnseenLlama · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Great! Now the government will be able to not only track my search results...but also attach my voice to it! Not that I'm scared or anything...

  2. Perhaps not what people first guess... by sreekotay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My first read (after reading the ARTICLE :P) is that this isn't voice recognition - its the old "wisdom of croweds" thing.

    I always found Google's "Did you mean ____?" to be better than any spell checker (pretty sure its a distance metric thing based on LOTS of mistyped input and follow-up for real users) - don't see a reason why that couldn't apply to voice...

    (non-trivially, probably, but still)
    --
    graphicallyspeaking

    --
    graphically speaking
  3. Prior art from the handicapped ? by MajorDick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I know of 2 people that have been searching the internet from voic command for over 6 years now.

    Is this prior art ?
    Google is OBVIOUSLY not the first to do it or even think of it.
    I can show you a half dozen Sc-Fi episode that have touched on this as well.
    How can you patent a communication medium's use ????

  4. I can't wait.. by William+Robinson · · Score: 2, Interesting
    My boss always uses words like 'shit', 'hell', 'sucks', 'piecce of shit', 'fsck' and so on..

    I can't wait to see his face when google toolbar will start throwing pages at him.

    --
    hilarious
  5. European Quaero. by magli · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I was almost sure that I had read something about a EC funded "google-killer" search engine being developed in europe, which planned to do this. Sure enough:

    Attack of the Eurogoogle (Need subscription).
    No subscription needed here
    From the article:
    researchers at the University of Karlsruhe are developing Quaero's voice-recognition and translation technology, with funding from the European Commission. [...] In addition, speaker-identification software will allow users (via computer microphones) to search the internet for audio clips recorded in their own voices, or those of other speakers.