When we launched
Voice Search more than two years ago, we wanted it to “just work” right out of the box, without an initial setup process. And so, we built speech models broad enough to accommodate a wide variety of people, regardless of gender, age, and accents, or variations in pitch, pace, and other factors. But we always knew we could build a more accurate model by listening to your voice, and learning how you — as a unique individual — speak. So today we’re launching personalized recognition.
If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.
The first time you use Voice Search, you’ll be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. Google takes your privacy seriously, so you can enable or disable personalized recognition at any time through the Google voice recognition settings on your phone. If you’d like to disassociate your voice recordings from your Google Account, you can do so through the
Google Dashboard in the Speech section.
The personalized recognition functionality is currently available for English in the United States. We plan to support other countries and languages in the near future. To enable it, you must have Android 2.2 or higher, and download the latest version of the Voice Search app from Android Market. The new app also includes some improvements to name recognition and speed, especially over 3G and EDGE connections.
So go ahead and download the latest Voice Search app, and let’s get personal!
Scan this QR code to download:
Posted by Amir Mané, Product Manager and Glen Shires, Member of Technical Staff
Google Mobile Blog
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Categories:
Google Android Feeds | Tagged:
Search,
Voice |
When we launched Google Shopper in February, I never expected that my 20% project would quickly become one of Google’s most popular Android applications. With over 2.5 million downloads in just 9 months, many Android users are using Shopper to help them shop on the go.
Today, we’re excited to announce the next version of Shopper. In addition to existing, popular features like local availability, fast barcode scanning and voice search, version 1.3 includes new search filters like “price” and “brand” to help users refine their searches to find the perfect product.
For example, if you’re looking for a new Blu-Ray player and you want to match it to your existing Denon receiver, you can filter by price and brand:
In addition, version 1.3 includes new “featured lists” – lists of products to help you shop during the holidays. When you have a spare moment, you can browse through suggested gifts and then click through to find the best place to buy them.
To get Shopper, Android users can go to Android Market for the free download. If you’re an iPhone user, you can use Mobile Product Search (m.google.com/products from an iPhone or Android device) to get many of the same great features.
Posted by Daniel Switkin, Senior Software Engineer, Google Shopper
Google Mobile Blog
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Categories:
Google Android Feeds | Tagged:
google,
Search,
Shopper |
Welkom*!
Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages. We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.
We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.
Check out the Google Research Blog for more details.
Salani kahle!**
* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu
Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer
Google Mobile Blog
Searching with Google on your Windows Phone 7 device just got easier. The Google Search app for Windows Phone 7 provides quick and convenient access to a rich set of search results, allowing you to search the web, images, local, news, and more.
This initial release of the Google Search app includes several features that help you to search faster – suggestions appear automatically as you type, you can choose to repeat a query from your search history, and your current location is used to provide more relevant results.
The Google Search app is a free download for all Windows Phone 7 devices and languages. Just search the Marketplace for “Google Search”, download, pin to Start, and the power of Google Search is only a click away.
Update: here is a link to the app in Zune Marketplace. You’ll need to be using a Windows Phone 7 device or Internet Explorer for the link to work.
Posted by Jon Skeet and Nick Radicevic, Google Mobile Team
Google Mobile Blog
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Categories:
Google Android Feeds | Tagged:
google,
phone,
Search,
Windows |
