Google Looks To Voice Search For Mobile

Google sees voice search as the future for mobiles and says it's making great strides in making it work well.

Speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of engineering, said that voice search could well be the future for mobiles, and that the company is constantly making great improvements in its offering.

"We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business."

According to the BBC, he acknowledged that the technology is still in its infancy (just last year, for instance, it could only recognize American accents), but that’s it’s constantly improving.

"Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it’s amazing. It’s working. It’s reached a tipping point. It’s growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it."

"It’s one of those technologies we think gets better with usage.”

"We launched it on the iPhone and have seen a 15% jump in accuracy because, as more people use it, we collect more data and our accuracy gets better."

Voice Search became a Google Mobile App for the iPhone last year. It’s also available for the T-Mobile G1 (no surprise there) and now also for the BlackBerry.

The company is also working on a prototype of Gmail for mobiles that uses HTML 5, and plans to offer the Chrome browser for the Mac in future.