Google has made good on its promise of improved voice search on
Apple’s iOS operating system. On Tuesday, the company released a new Google
Search app that brings natural language voice search to the iPhone and iPad.
A rival to Apple’s own Siri intelligent agent, Google’s app
provides contextual answers to voice queries, along with pertinent Web search
results. Those answers aren’t manually curated; they’re simply the Internet’s
best guess. But thanks to Google’s Knowledge Graph — a sort of storehouse
of semantic-search information — they seem to be generally pretty accurate.
During a Monday demo, Google product manager Hugo Barr showed the Android
version of voice search correctly and quickly providing information about local
movie times and answering questions like, “What is a baby kangaroo called?”
While the app doesn’t have the same system-level integration as
Siri, it appears to be well integrated with Google services like YouTube and
Maps, ably offering directions to the locations I asked of it and pulling up
query-relevant YouTube videos. It’s also very fast. Overall, an impressive
effort and one that will certainly keep Apple on its toes.
Here’s a video from Google showing
it off:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mmQl6VGvX-c
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