By What you say is what you search. Or at least that is Google’s latest tagline in promotion of their voice search capabilities for smartphones. In a new series of videos the search giant is showing off some of the various situations where voice easily outdoes text entry for searches. Voice searching is something that is in its fledgling stages of catching on, and Google has already made a larger push into voice as an input method with the release of Voice Actions for Android. It looks like Google wants to push the interaction method even more.
Maybe you have your hands tied up while working on the sink:
Or that moist hot tub is making it a bit hard to interact with your phone’s touchscreen:
The videos also include some YouTube trickery to allow you to click the very links that show up in the search results featured in the videos. So what do you think? Are any of you big users of voice search who find themselves in these sorts of situations or do you prefer good old fashion text?
[via Google Mobile Blog]
I use the voice search multiple times a day. It is indeed a killer feature that is beyond useful. In particular, “Navigate to…” and “Map of…” and “Set timer x minutes” is really useful.
ooh “set timer” didn’t know that one.
what about other languages? does it work to?
what about other languages? does it work to?
Its too bad it doesn’t work that flawlessly and I seriously doubt it would have worked that well outdoors with the added noise of the hot tub.
What a joke.
Touting like its so perfect.
The click portion on my google voice app doesn’t work…says that the app is being worked on. I can’t set am alarm or timer for that matter.
Ive used speech to text a few times before and half the time it takes longer to get it to recognize what I mean than it takes to actually type it out!
Are these ads targeted at white men?
For the second one, I’d love to see a parody where the guy says, “Calories bur-” and then drops the phone into the hot tub. On the other hand, maybe they could combine this with an ad for Aquapac.
As for voice search, I love “Listen to”. Awesome when combined with Pandora.
I love using it, but it has trouble understanding businesses with Spanish names. Living in South Texas, everything has a Spanish name, from the mall to most local restaurants.
I’ve tried it numerous times and have the same problem as Brando. It never gets it right. I can type it out much faster than say it, deleting it, saying it again, deleting it again….well you get the point.
i downloaded the timer app but only the voice commands work when the app is open. you can’t hold down the search button and say “set timer to ## minutes.” it just opens up a notification to download the latest clock from the android market.
Umm the hot tub guys is using an iPhone. WTF?
@Andrew… probably because they weren’t worried about him dropping one of those in the hot tub. It’d be a waste to lose a Droid like that!
Correct me if im wrong but the Google voice search works a lot more flawlessly on 2.2 than on other version of Android…I could be wrong….and I really don’t have issue at all honestly.
@Bobert I have used it in my car while the music was playing, and I didn’t bother turning down the volume. It still picked up what I said flawlessly.
@ggp Good point. When you put it that way then let em use iPhones in hot tub commercials. Although that could send the message that you’ll be cool and hangin out with chicks with your iPhone and then you’re some lonely guy working on his kitchen sink with an Android.
The guy in the tree is using an iPhone as well. Is google voice/search available for iOS?
works great for me on myts duno why everyones always crying
It works for me very well. For some easy to misunderstand words, extra care may be needed in articulating.
Also, if you have a foreign accent (British, Australian, or foreign language accent), then the results are really, really terrible — but they say you need to speak standard American.
Didn’t know set alarm. Map, email, text, directions, and navigate are all awesome and make my buddies jealous.
If you have a phone with noise cancellation like my Nexus One, then Voice Search actually uses the same double microphone to screen out background noise. Works great even in nightclubs with blaring bass dance music!
Bobert, I’ve used it on my Nexus One in a small bar where a band was play was playing some rock and roll and it worked great. Guess you’ve never tried and just like to knock it anyway……
Maybe it’s the noise canceling microphone, I don’t know. But it works quite well.
The newer Androids all have dual microphones, the 1st one monitors your voice and ambient and the second one monitors ambient, then it does magic.
HTC Hero CDMA is an example of an older Android that does not pick up voice commands or search if there is any ambient noise.
I think voice search works pretty amazing and am always like, “No way it got that right”, it also seems to do better the more you throw at it.