Mountain View, California -- In its relentless quest to maintain its position as the de facto resource for searching information on the Internet, global search engine behemoth Google Inc. debuted an array of enhancements to its flagship search box on Tuesday, with new features for both mobile searchers, desktop searchers adding voice queries, drag-and-drop image search and background preloading of the top result page to make search faster and more interesting.
The company, on Tuesday at its Inside Search event in San Francisco, took the wraps off several new features that has bolstered its world-domineering search service once again, alongside minor updates to its mobile web search functionality.
First up, the voice search service for desktop computers, which the Web giant launched, which was earlier available on mobile platforms like iOS and Android is now available on desktop computers.
Voice Search on the desktop moves computing one step closer to the natural user interface that has been the holy grail of computing for decades. With Voice Search, people query Google by speaking aloud. A tiny mic icon appears in the search bar. When clicked, a built-in or hooked-up mic will let you bark out some search terms and Google will pop off to find results online.
Google Voice Search for the desktop (Credit: Google)
"The lust for knowledge does not ends when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device." "In the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years' worth of voice to our system," Google fellow Amit Singhal said in a blog post.
A Google employee demonstrated the power of the voice analysis with complex requests like "pictures of the yellow-bellied warbler" and "weather for Schenectady, New York". The speech recognition feature is useful for difficult-to-spell words and long phrases, according to Google.
Basically, Voice Search on desktop works by utilizing Google's Speech API and will be available to anyone using Chrome 11 in English when it is "released over the next week", Johanna Wright, Google's director of search product management, said in another blog post. The feature, which will be released for 40 languages, also requires a working internal or external microphone. And, for now, it is only available in U.S. English.
"We have endowed tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology -- for instance, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say," Singhal wrote.
In an interview, Singhal said Google's voice recognition technology is far beyond search and that the company wishes to make voice input a ubiquitous component of computing, and will eventually become a staple of services like Google Docs.
Read More:http://news.ebrandz.com/google/2011/4106-google-debuts-voice-and-image-search-for-mobile-and-desktop-.html
Source:news.ebrandz.com
No comments:
Post a Comment