1st Experience with Google Search App w/ Voice Recognition for iPhone

Here’s a couple of quick comments on using the Google Voice Search App for iPhone, but first the caveats; I mumble alot & I have an Australian accent

1. When I first installed and launched Google Search (w/Voice) it crashed three times in a row while listening to the voice command, restarting the phone fixed this.

2. The interaction takes a while:
a. hold to head and wait for tone to indicate to start speaking
b. start speaking
c. wait for the proximity sensor to recognise that it isn’t next to your head any more
d. process
e. it enters the search term into the Google search field
f. searches for results.
I expect for most things it would be faster to just start typing in the Google search field, especially as it uses a type-ahead function which may help in reducing the number of characters you need to input. Longer natural language phrases are obviously going to be quicker to enter via speech, if it gets all the bits right..

3. The feedback sound when it is processing the voice input is awesome and worth trying out. I’ve worked on a bunch of Natural Language Speech Recognition systems and this feedback is the coolest You can hear it by keeping the phone to your head, or using headphones.

4. The inclusion of (access to) the introduction video is helpful for people who may not have used speech recognition before. Kind of like Apple’s instructional video on how to use gestures on the new trackpads is included in the Trackpad System Preferences window. People can learn alot about these new interactions with a quick demo video.

5. It’s good that there is a manual way to start the voice recognition, so people with headphones don’t have to hold it up to their head

6. BennyG suggested talking faster, this seemed to improve some things (“Apple Store London”), but not all (e.g. “The first man to land on the moon”)

7. I’ve been trying to voice search names in my address book, but they don’t show up at all. I’ll put it down to accent. Update: Techcrunch says you can’t search contacts using voice. Which really is totally understandable, because Google would have to run their voice rec over your contacts list and names are notoriously hard for NLSR processing.

I love the concept and one day it might work better for me but for now I’ll be sticking to on-screen keyboard text entry Google searches

Update: Waxy.org tries to deconstruct the speech recognition, with a response from Google

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