Google Voice Search and iPhone

Web-based video conferencing is easier to use and cheaper to deploy than traditional video conferencing systems. Using it can help enrich the quality of important meetings that might otherwise take place over the phone. Apple better treat Google like all developers and put the apps from google up when they feel ready to do so not when Google tells them to do so. Apparently it’s already been submitted to the App Store and Apple just has to approve it, which you can be sure they will. It’s not clear from the NYT article if it’s a completely new app or just an update to the Google search app.

Mobile network operators, too, must ensure they do not strangle Android at birth by making unreasonable demands about the kind of software that can run on the device, for fear that they may cannibalise their own revenue streams. Free voice-over-IP calling services such as an Android version of Skype, as well as over-the-air music download services and song streaming, must be allowed to thrive on the platform. Perfect voice recognition is one of the major goals of artificial intelligence researchers, as it would allow more natural communication between the human and the computer. Such a voice search service while definitely a step forward toward this goal, it is certainly not a step first taken by Google.

Users can now have free voice and video conversations by clicking on a new “Video chat” menu in a Gmail chat window. They can get a full screen view or a pop out that can be sized and positioned according to user preference. Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like Where’s the nearest Starbucks? The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

Speech recognition has been around for a while, but this application would showcase Google’s advances in this field. However, it makes you wonder why Google decided to debut the application on the iPhone when it could have tied it to its own Android G1 cellphone. Speech recognition is far from perfect and Google admits that sometimes the response to an inquiry is gibberish; but, this is artificial intelligence at work. The more it’s used, the better it will get at recognizing the way people ask questions in real life and the better the responses will become