Darren's Blog Rarely updated, barely interesting but all mine

19Nov/080

Google Mobile App: Voice Recognition for the iPhone

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

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 :lol:  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.

Comments (0) Trackbacks (0)

No comments yet.


Leave a comment


No trackbacks yet.