„How far is Cluj Napoca from Brașov?”. „Where do I found the first oil station on my way from Brașov to Cluj Napoca?”. You may type those phrase fast, but certainly you can say it even faster. And when you`re on the go, speed is what you`re looking for. As communication needs to evolve more quickly, Google invests in development of new technologies to improve the experience of web search on mobile devices. Voice Search allows users to search on the Internet as easy as talking on the phone. The application uses a vocal technology to transform spoken words into text and then performs the query on the Google search engine like text would be entered manually. All data are processed through technologies hosted in the cloud, not on the mobile phone, which means that the application is fast and easy to use.
Voice Search was already available in 29 languages, now bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish and Romanian.
Each new language usually requires initial collection of hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, as with other languages already available through Voice Search, the more often people use the application, the more accurate it becomes.
How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone do you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is to tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install the Voice Search app from Google Play. You can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.
Sources: Google Official Blog, Google Enterprise, Go4it, PC World
