Google Launches ‘Voice Search’ for iOS devices

by Prejushya Kalicharan - 10/31/2012 9947 Views

Google Entered the Voice Search Market Yesterday, Challenging SIRI

Google announced yesterday in its blog that the new Google VOICE SEARCH application for iPhone and iPad is now available in market. The highlight is - “It answers any question”. All you have to do is – Tap the microphone button, ask the question and listen to the results as well as get the answers tailored to your device, the very next second. The quality of results is bang on, enriched, targeted and much more informative, which obviously brings comparisons between each and every features embedded-within with that of SIRI. The company had already publicized back in August, on its steps to combine their speech recognition expertise that facilitates easy interpretation of questions asked and at times even speak out the results.

Google ‘Voice Search’ for a PC

Voice search application by Google is also available for desktop computers. Note the microphone icon beside the search bar, hit on this and ask your question to arrive at the answer eliminating the use of your key board to type in the query.

All you need is the latest updated version of Google Chrome and a microphone connected.

Significance

Don’t be worried about your English language or ‘not-better at speaking skill’, the application is too very brilliant to recognize your foreign accent and give you the results for whatever you ask for.

Google Search excels in web-related information providing like spotting locations to dine or finding directions. More plus features in Google’s voice search are the in-page text finder and the full-screen image search facilities.

When you ask a question like, “show me the images of King Cobra”, Google search directly takes you to their image results page, whereas SIRI confirms with you whether it should perform a web search for you. Clearly annoying!

BGR reports – “I’d say the difference in speed is akin to a Formula 1 car and a Tata Nano – Google is light years ahead in this space.” That’s lots of exaggeration and kind of funny in the ‘Tata Nano’ part.

Drawbacks

Some of the people who have tried using Google’s voice search raise a concern that all questions asked never return a voice response. Question of the sort, “What team does James Harden play for?” just returns web results without a voice response. But this was not what Google guaranteed in its announcement made yesterday.

Google’ announcement yesterday: “The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad helps you to do just that with enhanced voice search that answers any question with the comprehensive Google search results you know and love.”

But this was not the case when Google hinted on its ideas about launching voice search back in August. Have a look at the following lines:

“We’ve combined our speech recognition expertise, understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph so that Voice Search can better interpret your questions and sometimes speak the answers back as full sentences.”

SIRI performs better than Google in getting in touch with users available in your contact list, as well as provides better access to Facebook and twitter posts. SIRI is more like conversation while Google Search is more computerized, yes a robot answering you.

The application lacks system-wide functionality and thus not yet equipped to add updates to calendar, composing messages, setting alarms, and other low-level operations. However Google search manages to let the speaker sign in to his e-mail account. Silly, yet one more drawback is that I find it hard to represent this application as each and every time - “Google Voice Search”. It seriously needs a name to be represented with, alike the short and sweet ‘SIRI’, which in Tamil language means ‘smile’.

Comparing Google’s Voice Search and SIRI

Here is a video comparing Google’s Voice Search on the Galaxy Nexus and SIRI on iPhone 4S by PhoneBuff:

No doubt Google’s Voice search outsmarts SIRI covering areas of prompt replying, quicker response to a command, more accurate, faster in action while SIRI lags (3-5 seconds), and concise result display. However never being biased, we always know that an older version of iOS also might be a reason behind the delay in results returned by SIRI.

Well here is one latest video from Gizmodo, where Google excels:

Responses

“Actually, I tried it on an iPhone 5 and it was faster than SIRI on the same device. Very interesting, since it does not have SIRI's deep integration. I can't wait to see what it does on older, non-SIRI Apple devices.”
“Great update.. I like it.. SIRI never gave me proper results and couldn't understand properly.”
“Pros: fast voice recognition
Cons: No voice feedback, limited searches, voice recognition issues on other languages, limited worldwide searches, UI bugs in landscape mode
Worst: Google and AdMob Ads Terms”
“I wanted to hate this so bad, but I have to also admit it's impressive out of the gate. I asked where the nearest starbucks was and a very pleasant voice responded "there are several starbucks listed within 10 miles" and showed me the results. I like it. Darn it.”

Never taking sides, every application has its own pros and cons. SIRI was the inspiration and guide for Google to enter Voice Search. Yet Google’s Knowledge Graph proficiency of filtered through tons of data at its data banks and delivering results more to the efficiency of a human brain will certainly be a challenge to SIRI. Google will definitely grab few of the SIRI users; perhaps one of the reasons behind should be it still being the search king.

Category :

Google

Tags :

Google Voice Search, SIRI, Voice search, voice search for PC,

About Prejushya Kalicharan

SEO is a challenging field and I try my best to surpass this challenging environment which is unconditionally filled with opportunities, knowledge building and problem solving. I pursue what I .... more info about the author