Searching by voice on the iphone

I know this is old news by now, but while browsing some of my older posts, I remembered this news I read a while back in the New-York Times: Google Adds Searching by Voice to iphone. In April 2007, I had posted about the fact that it looked like Google was stepping in the voice industry because they had come out with a new product called Goog411.

Now with the introduction of search by voice on the iphone, Google is literally, and figuratively, making people talk in the Speech industry. Don’t get too excited though, Google’s “new invention” isn’t new at all. In fact, Nuance has been doing exactly this for two or three years already with a product called Nuance Voice Control. It’s an incredibly useful application that lets you make phone calls, search the web, dictate emails and view web pages on your mobile by using your voice instead of typing.

So, basically, the only one thing innovative about the speech capabilities of the iphone is that you can initiate the speech detection by simply tilting the iphone in a certain way. The same way the iphone will use the movement detection sensor, Google calls it the accelerometer, to change the image of your album cover when you tilt the phone horizontally. Anyways, as I said earlier, I’m interested to see where Google will take their speech recognition endeavors next. After all, the mobile industry is only growing (Estimated to 3.6 billion subscribers in 2008), and speech is the most natural input to a mobile phone.