Testing the Google Voice Search on the iPhone
Ralf Haller
January 17th, 2009
Only today Google’s iPhone voice search capability was made available to us in Switzerland. A simple iPhone Google apps upgrade in the App Store was needed and voice search was there. The official launch was on November 18 already so they let us wait for exactly 2 months. Curious to check it out myself, here a quick test with some words and what Google voice recognition understood me saying. Motion sensing worked well so when I moved the iPhone to my ear it changed into the voice reception mode automatically, great. Now here the test results: (Yes: recognized it right away, Yes (2): recognized it after 2 trials, No: did not recognize it even after 5 trials and show what it recognized instead)
Barack Obama - Yes
Hillary Clinton - Yes
Angela Merkel - Yes
movies - Yes
Switzerland - Yes
Zurich - No (sumif, jewish, souvenirs, houston tx, spanish)
Zurich city - No (sylvan ct, sudanese ct, tualatin ct, siliceous ct)
Bern - No (belmont, bedouin, bem, denmark, dan)
Basel - No (buy, mazel, boston, boces, usa)
Wikipedia - Yes (3)
Ok, well after all the buzz on their own blog site I thought it would be better. But at least it works for simple English expressions. If I will use it we will see, most likely not as it would have to be much more accurate to be a day-to-day tool and the advantages of using voice recognition vs. typing it in are not that great on the iPhone. Thanks anyway for a free new gadget.
Tags: Google iPhone app, Google search, search voice recognition