A recent update to the Google Search app for Android added enhanced support for the "OK Google" hotword. If you go to the settings, tap "Voice", then "OK Google Detection", you can enable "from any screen" and "from lock screen". This way, you can say "OK Google" to start a voice search or action when the screen is on or the device is charging and even from the lock screen. Right now, this feature is limited to English/US and requires Android KitKat.


When you enable these features, Google asks you to say "OK Google" 3 times to train the speech recognition software and it also enables Audio History. "When you use voice activation commands such as 'OK Google' or touching a microphone icon, a recording of the next thing you say, plus a few seconds before, may be used and stored by Google and associated with your Google Account to help recognize your voice and improve speech recognition."


Your recordings are available online at the Google Audio History page. "Only you can see your history. Some items may take up to an hour to display," informs Google. You can delete the recordings, play them or click the Google search links. Click the "gear" drop-down menu, click "delete" and you can pick from "past hour", "past day", "past week", "last 4 weeks", "the beginning of time" (the same options that are used by Chrome's "clear browsing data" feature).


You can disable Google Audio History from the Android app's settings, but this also disables "OK Google" detection from any screen or from the lock screen. "When Audio History is off, voice searches will be stored using anonymous identifiers and won't be saved to your Audio History, even if you're signed in to your Google Account," informs Google.

"Google uses your Audio History to: learn the sound of your voice, learn how you pronounce words and phrases, recognize when you say 'Ok Google' and improve speech recognition across Google products that use your voice."

The new Audio History feature seems to replace Personalized Voice Recognition, an opt-in setting added back in 2010. "If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy," explained Google back then.

While it makes sense for Google to improve the voice search history and build personalized voice models, I can't find any connection between the improved "OK Google" detection, which works offline, and the Audio History online service. It's probably an artificial requirement, just like the Google Now feature, which requires enabling location services in iOS, but not when using Android.

Google's voice search feature still has a long way to go. If you say "play music" or "play some music" in the Google Search app for Android, Google starts the Play Music app and opens the "I'm Feeling Lucky" radio, which is based on your listening history. I think it makes more sense to continue playing your music and use the current queue instead of creating a new playlist.



Google still doesn't support basic voice actions like "next song", "skip", "pause" or "stop the music". If you say "next song", Google only shows the search results and a list of songs from Next, an American R&B musical group.


You can say "play Alicia Keys" and Google will shuffle Alicia's songs:


You can also say "play blues" and Google will start the Blues radio. If you say "play hip hop", Google Play Music will show a list of search results for "hip hop".

That's what happens if Play Music is the default app that handles music voice actions. You can change it by saying "play Coldplay" or something similar, quickly tapping the icon next to the app's name, picking one of the music apps and tapping the selected app (I could choose between Google Play, Google Play Music, TuneIn Radio and Poweramp, but your list will be different, depending on the apps you've installed). The next time when you use a music-related voice action, the app you've picked will handle it. Most apps will show a list of search results or start playing music.


{ via +Google }

There's a cool Easter Egg in Google Voice Search: if you say "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", Google will answer: "Cheat mode unlocked, unlimited free Google searches". This is the Konami cheat code originally used for Nintendo games.


You can try this Easter Egg in the Google Search app for Android and iOS and in the Google Search site if you use Chrome for desktop.


The Konami code was also used as an Easter Egg in Google Reader, Google Docs (create a new document and press "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", then type ba and press Enter), Play Games and even for the Chromebook Pixel.

{ via Search Engine Land and Pierre Far }

The Google Search app for Android added voice commands for taking photos and recording videos. Just say: "take a photo", "take a picture", "record a video", "take a video", "shoot a video" and the camera app will launch in the proper mode.

"The first home run in T-ball, the surprise proposal, or just that gorgeous sunset... Sometimes the perfect photo passes you by as you fumble with your phone to open the camera app. Now with the Google Search App on Android, you can just tap the microphone or say 'Ok Google,' then 'take a photo' or 'take a video'," informs Google.

Google Voice Search works in Chrome for desktop, not only in Android and iOS. Just click the microphone icon from the search box and you can tell Google what do you want to know, assuming that you have a microphone.

Now you can bypass the microphone icon and use the hotword "OK Google" when you're using Google search or the new tab page. You need to install this extension first.


"Chrome will listen for you to say 'Ok Google' and then send the sound of the next thing you say, plus a few seconds before, to Google," informs the options page. By default, Google stops listening after 5 minutes to reduce battery consumption on a laptop.

Hotword detection works offline and doesn't send the recording to Google's servers until you say "OK Google". You need to open a Google search page or go to the new tab page first, assuming that you have the updated new tab page which uses the Google homepage. The extension only works for google.com, not for other Google domains:


You can tell if Google is listening by checking the microphone icon from the search box:



Now Google handles Voice Search queries differently. In addition to providing voice feedback and using the previous query for disambiguation, Google now changes your query and removes unnecessary word. For example, if you tell Google "show me some Brad Pitt movies", Google will show results for [Brad Pitt movies].

If you use Chrome, you've probably noticed the small microphone icon from Google's search box. It lets you search Google using your voice and it's now just as good as the voice search feature from Google's mobile apps.

There's even a keyboard shortcut for this feature: Ctrl+Shift+. (or ⌘-Shift-. for Mac). Yes, that's a dot, full stop or period.


"Say your question and hear an answer back on your desktop Chrome browser. All you will need is a built-in or attached microphone. Also, be sure to have the volume up on your computer to hear your answer loud and clear. Please note Voice Search with spoken answers back is available for US English only," informs Google.

"Open the Chrome browser and go to http://www.google.com/. You'll see a small gray microphone on the right-hand side of the search box. Click the microphone or press Ctrl+Shift+Period (Mac: ⌘-Shift-Period) with your cursor in the search box to start voice search. When the large red microphone icon appears, begin speaking. You can press ESC or click the red button to cancel. As you speak, Google will interpret your voice input. Afterwards, your results show up just as if you had typed the search term," mentions a help center article.

{ via Mike Downes }

Chrome for iOS has been updated and now includes the enhanced version of voice search that was available in the Google Search app. The upgraded voice search is more accurate, answers more question, has spoken feedback and it remembers your previous questions, so you can ask "how many calories are in an apple?" and then "what about an orange?".

The microphone icon has been removed from the address bar and it's now placed prominently next to the keyboard. If you start using the keyboard, the voice search button is replaced by some keys that are useful when you enter a web address: ":", ".", "-", "/" and a ".com" button.


Google now shows the words from your question as you speak, so you can see much faster if Google's speech-to-text engine understands what you're saying.


You'll hear the answer and Google will also show a card with more information. Spoken feedback can be disabled from the settings page: go to the voice search section and disable "speak answers back". "The answer can be a fact, weather condition, stock price, flight status, sports score, currency conversion, mathematical calculation, and more. Spoken answers are only supported in English at this time," informs Google.


Voice search is more useful as a Chrome feature than as a feature of the Google Search app, especially if you're already using Chrome. You don't have to open a new app and you can see the results for multiple questions because Chrome has tabs.

For some reason, Chrome for Android still includes the old voice search, but that should change in the near future.

Google can now answer questions about nutrition, but it's strange to see that this feature only works if you use voice search in Android, iOS or Chrome. "You will be able to quickly and easily find extensive nutrition information for over 1,000 fruits, vegetables, meats and meals in search. From the basics of potatoes and carrots to more complex dishes like burritos and chow mein, you can simply ask, 'How much protein is in a banana?' or 'How many calories are in an avocado?' and get your answer right away," informs Google.

It works for general questions like 'how many calories are in carrots' or for queries like 'carrots calories'.


By default, Google shows the number of calories in a medium carrot, but you can pick a different serving size: 1 slice, 100 grams, 1 cup grated and more. For now, you can't enter a custom serving size.


You can also disambiguate your query. If you search "tuna calories", you can select from bluefin, skipjack and yellowfin. Unfortunately, the list is incomplete and you can't select canned tuna.


Google shows a knowledge graph card with information from Wikipedia and nutrition facts, so you can quickly find the amount of saturated fat, cholesterol, protein or vitamins and minerals without clicking a search result.


And it's not all about calories. You can also ask: 'how much protein is in an egg?', 'how much cholesterol is in chicken?', 'how much saturated fat is in butter?', 'how much sugar is in Coca Cola?', 'magnesium in an apple', 'vitamin C in parsley'.


The feature only works in English and it's gradually rolling out, so it may not work for you. Try it in Android's Google Search app, Google's app for iOS or in Chrome (click the microphone icon from the search box).

Reminders are a new feature in the latest version of the Google Search app for Android. You can create reminders using voice search and Google Now will show notifications.

Now you can also create reminders from the desktop Google Search when you search for events. Use queries like [when is bonnaroo 2013?], [when is the first day of summer?], [halloween day] and Google shows a link that says: "Remind me on Google Now".


Click the link and "Google Now will remind you 1 week before." For now, notifications are only available if you use the Google Search app for Android, which also lets you manage reminders (delete reminders and set new ones).


{ via Search Engine Roundtable }

I found a great paragraph in a Google page about Gmail actions:

"Google Search is evolving from surfacing search results to answering questions. With Voice Search and Natural language queries, users can speak or type questions they have and see highly structured information cards in Search."

That changes how people interact with Google Search, how Google Search pages look, how queries are processed and what people expect from Google. When Google will be able to answer complex questions, to summarize long pages, use inferences to find new information and truly understand human language, you'll no longer need a browser for most searches. A Google search button can be embedded in any smart device from watches, fridges to smart glasses and cars.

In a recent video, Matt Cutts tries to predict the future of Google search: "It ought to be able to go out and take multiple sources of information and figure out how to combine those together and fuse or synthesize that information. And it should really be able to handle difficult syntax. So moving up the chain towards not just data or knowledge, but analysis, towards wisdom."

Amit Singhal announced at Google I/O that this is "the end of search as we know it". The future of search goes beyond search results and it has more to do with answering questions, conversations and anticipating user's intentions.

Google has 3 products with similar goals: Knowledge Graph, Voice Search and Google Now. They go hand in hand to deliver the future of search today.

Voice Search has been available on the desktop if you're using Chrome, but now it's much better: it has been upgraded to the conversational voice search released last year for Android and iOS. Just click the microphone icon from the Google search box, ask questions and you'll get a spoken answer. Soon you'll be to just say "OK Google" to trigger voice search.


Google Search for Android added some new Google Now cards: reminders, last train home (Japan only), real time public transit updates and recommendations for books, games and music albums. Google Now can understand things like "remind me to call Susan tomorrow at 10", "when I go to Rome, remind me to buy a new suit" or "remind me to meet Dan when I get to work". You can create both time-based reminders and location-based reminders.


Voice Search is getting more sophisticated, the Knowledge Graph has more facts and connections between concepts, while Google Now gets smarter and tries to anticipate your searches.

{ via Inside Search blog }

Here's something I don't understand: why do so many people confuse Google Now with Google Voice Search? There are a lot of articles that compare Google Now with Siri or claim that Google Now is a voice assistant.


Google Now is a feature of the Google Search app for Android that shows information about what's happening right now or in the near future: weather, calendar events, reservations, travel information. Try this: disable Google Now in Google's search app and you can still use voice search. After all, Google Voice Search has been available before Google Now. Google Search for iOS includes Voice Search, but it doesn't have Google Now yet.

One of the explanations why many people confuse Google Now with Google Voice Search is that Google Now and the improved Voice Search have been announced at the same time, when Jelly Bean was released. Google Now is shorter and sounds better than Google Voice Search.

Even the Wikipedia article for Google Now is inaccurate: "Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant available for Google's Android operating system. An extension of Android's native Google Search application, Google Now uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. Along with answering user-initiated queries, Google Now passively delivers information to the user that it predicts they will want, based on their search habits."

Google's search app for iOS has always included voice search. Now iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users can try Google's updated voice search, 5 months after the Android Jelly Bean launch. Just install the latest version of the Google Search app.

The original voice search feature was just another way to enter a query. The new version shows instant answers and a robotic voice reads them for you. Another improvement is that your words are displayed as you speak, so you don't have to wait so much.




Google's voice search is more interactive and Google does a better job at answering simple questions, but it doesn't integrate with the operating system like Google Search for Android or Siri. You can't use it to launch apps, play music, check your calendar or add an alarm, but it's great for weather forecasts, sports scores, definitions, unit conversions, simple calculations, facts. Try "play Rihanna Diamonds video" and the video starts playing, "cat pics" returns image search results, "directions to Los Angeles" shows Google Maps directions.


It's hard to beat Siri because Apple's iOS feature is easier to access and it integrates with the built-in apps. Siri is also conversational, it remembers things and doesn't require some specific keywords in a certain order. For example, you can ask Siri [is it cold outside?], [will it rain should I get my umbrella tomorrow?] and you get accurate answers. Google doesn't answer the second question and only shows the current temperature for the first question. Google's voice is less robotic, Google supports more languages than Siri, local search results are not limited to a few countries and Knowledge Graph results constantly get better. Still, Siri feels more like a voice assistant, while Google Voice Search is another way to search the Web and get impersonal answers from Google. Understanding the query continues to be a difficult task.

{ via Google Blog }

Chrome has more than 310 million active users and it's the most popular browser in the world, according to Google's data. It's available for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Chrome OS, Android and now iOS. That's right, you can install Chrome on an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad that runs iOS 4.3+.


Obviously, Chrome for iOS doesn't use the V8 JavaScript engine and it's has to rely on Safari's old JavaScript engine. The bad news for Chrome and all the other third-party apps is that they can't use Apple's fast Nitro JavaScript engine and the only app that can use it is Safari. That means Chrome on iOS is slower than Safari and slower than Chrome on Android. According to Anandtech.com, Chrome's JavaScript performance is almost three times worse than Safari's performance.

So why use it? It borrows the interface of Chrome for Android, it syncs bookmarks, passwords and visited pages, it doesn't limit the number of tabs you can open, it has an incognito mode, it comes with the powerful Omnibox and integrates Google Voice Search.


Chrome for iOS is more about the ubiquity of Google's browser and being able to access your bookmarks and the pages you visit from almost any device.

Chrome has always being associated with the word "fast" and it's likely that many iPhone / iPad users will be disappointed that Chrome for iOS is not fast enough. Unfortunately, Apple's policies don't allow Google to use its own JavaScript engine or even Safari's fast JavaScript engine.

My other complaint is that Chrome for iPad uses a tab overflow feature that's annoying and far from intuitive. When you open many tabs, you'll notice that Chrome collapses exactly the tabs you've recently used.


When Google released Chrome 4 years ago, few people would have expected that the new browser will become more popular than Firefox and Internet Explorer. Chrome's popularity continues to grow and the new release for iOS will allow iPhone and iPad users to get a glimpse of Google's browser. Those who want more can buy an Android device.

If Android ICS (4.0) was about a completely new user interface, Jelly Bean (4.1) is about refining that interface, improving the performance and adding more features.

Google's Project Butter made Android 4.1 more responsive. The interface is smoother, scrolling feels faster, transitions and animations look better. "Android 4.1 reduces touch latency not only by synchronizing touch to vsync timing, but also by actually anticipating where your finger will be at the time of the screen refresh. This results in a more reactive and uniform touch response. In addition, after periods of inactivity, Android applies a CPU input boost at the next touch event, to make sure there's no latency," explains Google.

Jelly Bean comes with rich notifications that can include more content and buttons. Notifications can be expanded and turn into powerful widgets so you can preview photos, share news articles, snooze alerts without opening an app.


Android's keyboard now predicts what you are about to type. "The language model in Jelly Bean adapts over time, and the keyboard even guesses what the next word will be before you've started typing it." The nice thing is that you don't need an Internet connection to see the suggestions. Google even made Android's text-to-speech feature work offline, but only for English.

Google's search app has a new interface that does a better job at handling simple questions. Instead of displaying a list of search results, Google only shows the Knowledge Graph OneBox that includes an answer, a thumbnail and a link to the source. Voice Search has also improved: you no longer need to use predefined commands, it understands natural language and it speaks back to you, just like Siri.


Sometimes you don't need to type a query to find relevant information. Your Android phone knows a lot about you and can help you solve problems without even asking it. Google Now is a new app that offers a lot of useful information depending on your location, your calendar events, your Google queries and more. It shows weather reports, "how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you're standing on the platform, or your favorite team's score while they’re playing".


Android 4.1 also adds support for Google Cloud Messaging, encryption for all paid apps, smart app updates (only what's changed is downloaded), multicast DNS-based service discovery (applications can easily find other wireless devices), USB audio, multichannel audio (including native AAC 5.1), audio chaining, as well as an interface for choosing where to play media.

There are many audio-related improvements and one of the main reasons for that is a new Android device called Nexus Q. It's a streaming player that costs $299, is made in the US and bridges services like Google Play and YouTube with your speakers and your TV. It comes with a 25W amplifier, it has a dual-core ARM CPU, it runs Android 4.0 and it has a lot of ports (micro HDMI, optical audio, Ethernet, jack speaker, micro USB). It's pretty heavy (2 pounds/923 grams), looks like a sphere and has LEDs that change their color when you're playing music. It's a combination of Apple TV, Boxee Box and Sonos players, but it's rather expensive and limited.


Google also launched Nexus 7, a 7-inch Android tablet manufactured by Asus that will compete with Amazon's Kindle Fire. It has a 1280x800 IPS display with Gorilla glass, a Tegra 3 CPU, 8/16 GB of internal storage, 1 GB of RAM, a front-facing camera and it weighs 340 grams, but the device is not about specs. Nexus 7 integrates with Google Play, which now also offers magazine subscriptions, TV shows and movie purchases. Nexus 7 costs $199 (the 8 GB version) or $249 (the 16 GB version), it's Wi-Fi only and it doesn't support SD cards. Nexus 7 looks like a strong contender for the most popular 7-inch tablet and it's probably the cheapest off-contract Android device that's worth buying.


Both devices will ship in mid-July, but you can pre-order them from the Nexus store, assuming that they're available in your country. Nexus Q is only available in the US, while Nexus 7 can be purchased if you are in the US, Canada, UK or Australia. "Nexus 7 comes preloaded with some great entertainment, including the movie 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon,' the book 'The Bourne Dominion,' magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and Popular Science, and songs from bands like Coldplay and the Rolling Stones. We've also included a $25 credit to purchase your favorite movies, books and more from Google Play, for a limited time," mentions Google.

When will Jelly Bean be available? "Starting in mid-July, we'll start rolling out over-the-air updates to Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S, and we'll also release Jelly Bean to open source," explains Google. Another good news is that, starting with Android 4.1, there's a PDK (platform development kit) that's shared with OEMs a few months before each Android release so that they have more information about the new features and start updating their software early.

There are now more than 400 million Android devices and 1 million devices are activated every day. Google Plays hosts more than 600,000 apps.

Two of the most important Google mobile services: voice search and visual search will now be available from your computer.

Voice search, a feature that's built into Android, also works in Google Chrome and allows you to search using your voice. Chrome added support for the Speech Input API back in April and it's the only browser that implemented the API. Right now, Chrome's speech input feature is only available for English.

"We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are. You should never have to stop and ask yourself, 'Can I speak for this?' — it should be ubiquitous and intuitive. So we've added speech recognition into search on desktop for Chrome users. If you're using Chrome, you'll start to see a little microphone in every Google search box. Simply click the microphone, and you can speak your search," explains Google. The feature is gradually rolled out, so you may not see it yet.


Google Goggles is a full-fledged visual search engine that's trapped in a mobile application. But why do you have to buy a smartphone to use Google Goggles when you could simply upload an image to Google and find related pages and images on the Web? "Search by Image" does more than TinEye, the "reverse image search engine" that lets you find an image on the Web.

"Google uses computer vision techniques to match your image to other images in the Google Images index and additional image collections. From those matches, we try to generate an accurate 'best guess' text description of your image, as well as find other images that have the same content as your search image. Your search results page can show results for that text description as well as related images," mentions Google.

You can drag and drop an image to the search box, paste an image URL in the search box or click the camera icon and upload an image. Google generates a hybrid results page that shows both related images and Web search results for the equivalent text query.


Google also a developed two extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you right-click on an image and use it as a query. "With these extensions, you can initiate a search on Google using pictures on the web. You can discover photos of places, learn more about art pieces, identify landmarks, and more."


While voice search and visual search are useful, the most impressive search feature launched by Google today is Instant Pages. The new feature only works in Chrome 13+ (available in Canary/Dev Channel and soon in beta), but it will radically improve your search experience. Chrome prerenders the top search result if it's likely that you will select it, so you no longer have to wait for the page to load. You might remember a feature called "prefetching" that was first supported by Firefox. Prerendering is a lot more powerful than prefetching.

According to a Chrome developer, "prefetch is Firefox style prefetching of resources specified (just populating the cache). In Chrome, with prerender, we don't just download the URL specified, but render the whole page including running all the JavaScript and downloading and rendering all the embedded resources."

For most users, Instant Pages will look like magic. They'll search for [nytimes] or [amazon], click the first result and be surprised to see that the page loads instantly. Google says that this feature saves 2-5 seconds on a typical search.


But Chrome's prerendering is not limited to Google searches. Any Web developer can use it by inserting a link element with a special value for the "rel" attribute. "Sometimes a site may be able to predict with reasonable accuracy which link the user is most likely to click on next -- for example, the 'next page' link in a multi-page news article. In those cases, it would be faster and better for the user if the browser could get a head start loading the next page so that when the user clicks the page is already well on its way to being loaded," suggests Google.

Voice Search is a Google Chrome extension that lets you search using your voice. It's not developed by Google, but it uses an experimental Chrome feature called form speech input. The feature is enabled by default in the dev channel builds, but it can be manually enabled by adding a command-line flag.

"Voice Search comes pre-loaded with the following default services: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha. You can also add your own user-defined search engines. It also integrates a speech input button for all websites using HTML5 search boxes. This extension requires a microphone. Speech input is very experimental, so don't be surprised if it doesn't work. Also, try to speak clearly for best speech recognition results," suggests the author.


Speech recognition is limited to English and it doesn't work very well, but this extension is a good way to test a feature that will be enabled in the future Chrome releases. If you have a website, it's quite easy to add support for speech input, but it may take a while until Google's Speech Input API specification becomes a standard and all browsers implement it.

{ Thanks, Silviu. }

Google announced that GOOG-411, the free directory assistance service launched in 2007, will be discontinued next month. GOOG-411 is available in the US and Canada, where it was launched as a free alternative to the expensive services provided by telephone companies.

The service has helped Google build a large database of voice samples and improved the voice recognition technology. Here's what Google's Marissa Mayer said about GOOG-411:

"The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that. ... So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we're trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy."


2007 was also the year when iPhone and Android were launched. Smartphones turned out to be better suited for voice-powered search because the service was easier to use and it could integrate with the phone. Google launched a mobile voice search app for iPhone in 2008, a built-in search app for Android in 2009, followed by voice input and voice actions this year. The mobile Google Maps app for Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile added support for voice search, which now works in more than 10 languages.

Google no longer focused on GOOG-411 and decided to discontinue the service. "Our success encouraged us to aim for more innovation. Thus, we're putting all of our resources into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages," explained Google.

A good alternative to GOOG-411 is BING-411 (1-800-BING-411), Microsoft's service that gives you turn-by-turn driving directions, traffic conditions, and weather reports. The service is only available in the US.

Here's one of my favorite Google promotional videos:


{ Thanks, Bill. }

Google updated Android's voice search application and added support for actions. In addition to searching the Web, you can now use the application to send text messages and email messages, find songs and start playing them, call your contacts and local businesses, launch Google Maps Navigation and get directions to a location, visit a site using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature and more. It's like iPhone's voice control, except that there are more actions available and you need an Internet connection to use it.

"Voice Actions are a series of spoken commands that let you control your phone using your voice. To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the Speak Now screen," explains Google.



Here are some examples of actions you can try after installing the app:
* go to Google News
* map of London
* call [name of one of your contacts]

For some reason, you can't use the built-in app to play music, so you need to install Pandora, Last.fm, Rdio or mSpot before using actions like "listen to Morcheeba". It would be nice to use voice actions to launch applications or to use custom actions defined by other applications.

The new version of the voice search application requires Android 2.2 (Froyo) and voice actions are limited to English (US). Search for [voice search] in the Android Market or use this QR code. If you're not in the US, you want to try the application and you have root access to your phone, you might need to install Market Enabler and fake your location.

Google also released:

* a new version of the Gesture Search app for Android, which adds a motion gesture for starting the application
* a new version of the Google Search widget, with support for query refinements
* Chrome to Phone, which lets you send links and short texts from Google Chrome to a phone that runs Android Froyo. If you've previously installed the Chrome extension and the associated Android app, you should first uninstall them. There's also a Firefox extension that offers similar features.

{ via Google Blog }

In 2002, Google Labs introduced a service that allowed you to search Google with a simple phone call. Unfortunately, the service wasn't very useful because the results were displayed on your computer and Google discontinued it.


Six years later, Google Mobile App for iPhone introduces the same feature, but this time the search results are displayed in the same application. Google built a sophisticated platform for text-to-speech and speech recognition using data from GOOG-411 and we can already some of its applications in Mobile Google Apps, YouTube and in this updated iPhone app.


It's quite weird to say how to download the app: since Apple doesn't offer user-friendly permalinks, you'll have to visit the iPhone App Store and search for "Google Mobile App". This iPhone app is just a sneak-peak into the future of mobile search, which will become more intuitive and easier to use.

"In the next 10 years, we will see radical advances in modes of search: mobile devices offering us easier search, Internet capabilities deployed in more devices, and different ways of entering and expressing your queries by voice, natural language, picture, or song, just to name a few. It's clear that while keyword-based searching is incredibly powerful, it's also incredibly limiting. These new modes will be one of the most sweeping changes in search," anticipates Marissa Mayer. She even envisions a "wearable device that does searches in the background based on the words it picks up from conversations" to illustrate how search will become a part of our life.