Google has migrated their old Voice Search application to the iPhone as part of their Google Mobile App software. Alex Chitu has a nice screenshot of the original interface from 2002. Google continues to run GOOG-411.
The core voice recognition algorithms used in the industry are mostly the same ideas optimized over the last 20 years, benefiting from the increases in processor power and storage. The big difference is in the volume and nature of data collected for the acoustic and language models. Google is legendary for their insatiable appetite for all kinds of data. The recent debut of a many-to-many translation service shows that they have plenty of data for advanced language models.
It’s not clear that speech recognition is the best tool for undirected tasks (i.e. interpreting responses to “What do you want to search for?”) I recall a few startups that used cheap human transcribers instead of speech recognition, such as Jott.
I plan to poll people with iPhones to see if they find the voice search feature worth using more than once. I don’t think I will get much out of it personally, because A) I type much faster than I speak (even on the iPhone), and B) I often search for proper names and abbreviations which are likely not high up in the language model.
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