Here’s 9 tips for Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone. The voice recognition is very cool.
I like the slick interface, because all you have to do is start the app. When you want to do a search, just hold the iPhone to your ear. The iPhone’s accelerometer senses the movement and makes a “baBUM” noise to let you know when to talk. Then just say a query like [daffodil pictures] or whatever. It’s much smoother to experience than it is to write down. The net effect is as if you had some kind of Star Trek communicator device, except powered by Google instead of Spock and the rest of the crew.
…The last thing I like is subtle. This app has changed the way that I do queries. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge search geek. I’m hyperaware of when my query habits change, and I notice myself much more likely to do off-the-cuff queries such as [what's the average price per square foot for carpet?] or [how many miles per gallon do Audis get?] or [what is a softshell jacket?] or [what does the 11-99 foundation stand for?]. Marissa Mayer once kept a diary of all the searches she wanted to do during one day, and mentioned about 20 queries that came to mind. I feel like I had almost that many queries just driving into work. This app lowers the bar to doing searches. For a few days I was like a five-year-old just doing queries as they popped into my head. The easier/faster it is to search, the more I searched.
Not only have I started to do more queries, but I also say longer, more natural-language queries. Why? Because the more contextual clues I can give to the voice recognition engine, the better it will do. So a query like [mount everest elevation feet] might work, but [how high is mount everest] is more likely to be recognized (in my limited experience). The way you formulate queries is different when you’re speaking compared to when you type. I’m still pondering the implications of that.
Is the app perfect? Of course not. Right now it keeps a history of my last six queries. Personally, I’d like to keep all my queries so I can go back and find previous searches. And the voice recognition, while very solid, will continue to improve over time. I’d also love a way to add my own personal vocabulary of terms such as “PageRank” or “webspam” (which currently comes up as webcam). So the app will improve, but I still feel like I have K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider in my pocket a lot of the time.
The first time you hold a phone up to your ear and just say “18 percent of 33 dollars” and get a Google calculator answer back that it’s 5.94 dollars, it’s an epiphany. Now I don’t need a tip calculator application; I just talk to my phone and it tells me to leave a six dollar tip:
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