Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Voice search app for iphone from google

Before going into the details of the application, it will be interesting to know some funny things that happened with it. Google launched the application on Friday, 14-Nov-2008. But the application did not appear in the apple store even on monday. Apple forgot to add the application to their app store. There are also reports that the delay is because of the apple's strict review process. But this should definitely have been coordinated better for the launch.

Talking about the application, as is obvious from the name, it searches the web based on voice commands. No need to type into those tiny keyboard offered by mobile phones. Just ask the question. Added to this, the application exploits the GPS in the phone to provide location based services. So, you can ask "Where is the nearest Starbucks coffee shop?". Interesting, isn't it ? The results that you get are text results but optimized for mobile phone display. The phone numbers etc stand out explicitly so that you can use them to dail out.

As with other google products, this application is also free. The initial hands-on reports on this application says that the application is awesome and accurate. Accurate both in terms of recognizing the voice and the results. This application cannot be used for any other phone functions like dailing your contacts etc. This application is purely meant for search.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Forget the touch. Just talk.

There is no doubt that apple, with its touch technology, has raised the bar very high for the mobile phone industry. I am sure many of it competitors are still spending sleepless nights. Other players like HTC & LG had come up with their version of touch technology but definitely not surpassing apple. Ofcourse, apple will always have the early bird advantage.

It seems that people are exploring ways other than touch to impress customers. That is what Microsoft exactly did. They come up with a voice command interface to control the mobile phone. While this is not new to the mobile phone industry, the set of features offered by this new software are much more superior to what was already seen.

Earlier, many mobile phone vendors offered what is commonly known as "voice dialing". To be able to do that, a voice tag has to be associated with a particular contact. Then only one would be able to dial that contact using voice. But now, with Microsoft’s "voice command" software, there is no need to tag each contact. You just say the name. The software identifies the corresponding contact and asks you for confirmation before dialing. If you say “yes” it would dail that number or else if you say “no” it would try to find the next closest match. It uses something called speaker independent phonetic speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.

This is nothing compared to hell lot of others features offered by this software. It can be used for e-mail notifications, spoken caller ID, controlling media player, controlling utilities, calendar lookup etc. It can be used to quickly check the time, date, and battery level also. See this link from Microsoft to see the feature list or even better, see the software in action in this video.