When tech giants like Google and Apple work on a collaborative project, the whole speculation around it goes hyper. We knew that Google was working on some Apple app. Now let’s spill the bin, which is quite tasty too. Google has created an iPhone App, that will let you search via voice on the iPhone. Google has done something pretty amazing with voice recognition and mobile platforms. This application will, quite simply, sell iPhones.

Google iPhone spoken search will be made available to Apple iPhone and iPod users today via the Apple iTunes store, and will let users ask questions that are not only local directory sensitive (like the 1-800-GOOG-411 experiment) but also basic search questions which request facts or figures. The application uses advanced speech recognition software which interprets the user’s vocal request, and passes it on to Google’s search engine. The results can be displayed in as little as a few seconds, depending on the network speed.

The Google results, according to the New York Times, can automatically detect the location of the iPhone via GPS and serve localized results. So if you’re standing in the middle of Times Square and ask “Where is the nearest Afghan restaurant?” your results would be locally targeted and different than if you were standing in the middle of Tribeca.


The voice search option in Mobile App for iPhone is turned off by default. Moreover, it comes with a warning that the speech-recognition only works in English, and is most effective when spoken with a North American accent. So how does it cope with the British tongue? Actually, the rather poor translation of our headline aside, our first impression is that it’s pretty good.



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