Google Voice Search is, frankly, amazing. Not because it works well. Most of my searches so far have been comically misinterpreted, though I note that (for research purposes only you understand) "Britney Spears" has a 100% success rate, even when I don't employ my appalling California accent.

No - to me, it's the sheer chutzpah of doing something like this, and the laser-like focus on reducing the time between deciding your wanting to know something, and Google giving it to you. I touched on this topic briefly in my talk on Monday at Future of Mobile, and Tim O'Reilly has a nice post about mobile being the lynchpin between humans and the cloud - spot on.

Can you imagine what sort of world we'll live in in 5 years time, when improvements in voice recognition (probably based around brute-force techniques rather than smart voice recognition algorithms - scale's just another tool to these guys) put an increasing percentage of our species' collective knowledge even closer? Beautiful.

Comments

[David Mery]

The UI is superb in its simplicity.

As for the future, there are many worrying aspects to this technology in the hand of a private company with a focus on selling ads. There's a very good write up by Jan Chipchase at http://www.janchipchase.com/blog/archives/2008/11/voice_search_so.html (In a somewhat related post, not directly about this product, I explored the issue of subsequent out of context use of voluntarily shared information in http://gizmonaut.net/blog/writing/information_accountability.html)

br -d

[C. Enrique Ortiz]

Yes, when TellMe Networks launched their voice search app (http://www.tellme.com/you) they demonstrated the power of voice as interface. That app also worked well. I'm not sure who Google is using in the back-end (Nuance I would bet), but I can say voice applications are super expensive to run; so I wonder if the ad-model will be sufficient to break-even, or if they will have an upsell of some kind... Cheers,

ceo