Darren’s Blog

Yesterday Google released Google Mobile App for the iPhone an application that provides a central point to launch all your Google applications from, it also features a search facility that is location aware and boasts voice recognition.

TechCrunch featured an article First Look At Google Mobile App For iPhone: Great But Not Second Coming which examples the applicaiton features and compares it’s results to those shown my google in their demonstration video.

I this article I’m going to look at how well the application performed when I tried some basic searches in the office this morning.

Google Mobile App: Settings

My first observation was the the voice search button was not on the search dialog, slightly deflated and wondering if the feature was not available on the UK version I headed to settings to see if there was anything there that could be done.  A quick review of the settings revealed that Voice Search was not enabled by default and needed to be switched on.

 I also noticed that there was a caveat stating that it worked best with North American accents, so considering the number of accents there are in North America I thought let’s see what if makes of a proper Northern accent

The Test

To make the test a fair one I decided to pick some common things that people are likely to search for… or at least I would search for  I picked four broad categories Food, Drink, Entertainment and Travel and tried to search for things within them, so my chosen search terms were:

• Food
  Pizza, Chinese Food, Indian Food, Supermarket 
• Drink
  Pub, Beer, Lager, Vodka 
• Entertainment
  Cinema, World of Warcraft 
• Travel
  Train Station

Six out of the eleven searches returned the right results, well actually six and a half, Vodka initially returned Monica but I decided to try again and got the right results.  Here are the screenshots of the search results for each search in no particular order.