Google Is Taking Spoken Questions

The New York Times is reporting that Google has added a voice interface to their iPhone search software. Expected to make its debut as early as Friday, users will be able to speak into their phone and ask any question they could type into Google's search engine. The audio will be digitized and results will be returned via the normal search interface. "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."

Comments

Android.

[Trespass]

So, did you roll it out because you lost a bet or what?

Re:Good voice transcription?

[His Shadow]

"why don't they let more than just iPhone users take advantage of this, dagnabbit?"

For the same reasons all the nerds despise the iPhone: because of it's uniformity right across the board, powerful graphics and CPU and consistent user experience. If you want to debut a powerful application, the iPhone makes the most sense of any platform. And given the fractured nature of every other vendors offerings, why ruin the experiment on crappy inconsistent platforms? Go with the best, someday release for the rest.