All Articles Tagged voice search

Looks like Google isn’t the only one making sure that when a user talks, the iPhone listens. Vlingo wrote in to tell us that their well-known BlackBerry app is now available for the iPhone, and it sure looks like they’ve been listening as well!

Vlingo lets you:

• Initiate calls to anyone in your address book.
• Look up anything through Yahoo! or Google in one step. Just say, “Web search: concert tickets in Boston,” and the results are displayed.
• Look up and map local listings. For example, by saying, “Find Italian restaurants in San Francisco,” vlingo will show choices and can populate Google Maps with the touch of a button.
• Send Facebook and Twitter status updates without typing. Vlingo also automatically embeds a Web browser so users can easily access the mobile versions of Facebook and Twitter to keep track of their friends’ updates.

Google works pretty well, but doesn’t include contact search (and seems to have trouble with British, Southern, or anything other than TV-ized North American accents.)

Vlingo does search contacts, and does a good job of it (and even suggests alternatives, which is welcome when it has trouble distinguishing between individuals with close-sounding names). However, unlike Google (which uses forbidden API’s to access the phone-like “lift to your ear and start talking” functionality) you have to press a button, then talk, then press a button again when you’re finished. There are helpful tutorials included to get you used to the process and on your way.

Gallery after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: iPhone dev extraordinaire Erica Sadun investigated over at Ars and found the following: Google is both linking to Private Frameworks and using unpublished APIs. While the latter is likened to jaywalking, the former is apparently a ban-worthy offense. Yikes. Check out her complete investigation for more. And now that it’s public, the question shifts to what if anything Apple will do about it? Cave to Google over a killer feature and betray the confidence of other developers, or yank Google’s app, alienating a huge (if guilty) partner and likely creating another furor among users?

Original post:

Is Google using private (i.e., not publicly available via the official iPhone SDK) APIs to create the silky-smooth “raise the phone and talk” activation for their new Advanced Voice Search feature in the update Google Mobile App? That’s the latest question Daring Fireball’s been looking into, and here’s what they’ve found so far:

If you use something like the command-line strings utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there’s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named proximityStateChanged. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary — which, of course, you wouldn’t do, because you’re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I’m just saying if one were to do this — a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement proximityStateChanged.

DF posits three possible explinations: 1) No one at Apple noticed the private API usage, 2) Apple noticed but turned a blind-eye, or 3) Apple approved the use of a private API. Citing sources, DF claims #3 to not be the case, and perhaps that’s why Google promoted the feature so heavily, and stirred up interest so high Apple would feel pressure to approve it (though we wonder if Steve Jobs’ Apple ever feels that type of pressure?)

By contrast, DF states #1 is not without precedence, while #2 would be grossly unfair to other developers, and either way, users may suffer if Apple makes changes to their private APIs (which is one of the reasons to keep them private after all).

So what do you think? Which scenario is most likely? And what would you rather, that developers (Google or not) use officially unsupported features if it means better apps but also apps that might just break when the next firmware drops?

Update: The App Store is now pushing out the update. Enjoy!

NOTE: If you don’t see the microphone icon immediately in the top right corner, tap the Settings button at the bottom right, and switch the slider to “Enabled”.

Original post:

Well, it’s definitely later than last Friday, but it doesn’t look like anyone, including Apple, delayed this long: Google’s Mobile App (iTunes link) now includes the much talked about Advanced Voice Search feature… sorta.

According to Jeremy, iTunes isn’t pushing the update yet, and you actually have to delete the app first if you’ve already installed it in order to get the latest, greatest, chattiest version on your iPhone. (Yup, you read correctly, this isn’t a new App, but an update to Google’s existing iPhone search App.)

Of course, I don’t have an iPhone right now, but if you do, try it out, ask it just how tall Everest really is, and let us know what kind of response you get!

And for you privacy advocates out there, is the coolness factor of this enough to give Skynet, er… The Matrix, um… Google access to your voice ID?

(Thanks to Trevor, Josh, Craig, Bob, for sending this in!)

The New York Times (via Giz) is reporting that Google’s love for the iPhone is about to hit epic, Shakespearian proportions with the release of their ground-breaking “advanced voice search” App:

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?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” 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.

Will it be perfect? Nope. It will sometimes return nonsense, and indeed the researchers behind it claim it will never reach 100% — but they’re aiming to make it as good as it can possibly be.

This caps off several weeks of Google announcements for the iPhone, of course, including OS 2.2 updates for Street-View, Transit and Walking Directions, and Location Sharing for the Maps App, the release of Google Earth, and an optimized version of the Google Search page for the iPhone.

So, when’s this hitting the App Store, and aside from candy, flowers, and a lobster dinner, what could possibly be next?!