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.
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
Posted by: David Mery | November 21, 2008 at 03:58 PM
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
Posted by: C. Enrique Ortiz | November 21, 2008 at 04:47 PM