Mountain View, California — Many products from the house of search engine leader Google Inc., are initially available in English, and then spreads out into languages like French, Italian, German, Spanish and then into any other language. But Google Search by voice has grown up pretty rapidly, as it broke with tradition and taken a quick leap to the new horizon — by moving straight from English to Mandarin Chinese. The search giant on Monday announced that users of Nokia S60 series mobile phones could now search the Internet using voice commands in Mandarin Chinese.
Google voice search has certainly been moving swiftly around the English-speaking countries and getting better at picking up a range of accents, from the US, U.K., India and Australia.
“So far voice search has only been available in English, but the new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 devices works for Mandarin speakers, too,” Google said in a blog post.
Of course, Mandarin Chinese is a famously complicated language, and in a post on the Official Google Blog, Elke Michlmayr, a software engineer, acknowledged that Google Search by voice users should not anticipate perfect results just yet. Apparently southern Chinese accents may pose a problem.
“Although the service currently works only on the Nokia S60 series phones, but we are exploring other options to include support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile devices, such as Android and iPhone,” Google said.
Nokia S60 series phones are most widely used around the world. So if you have an N-series or E-series phone such as the N95 or E71, which means you are possessing S60. Many of these phones have 12-digit keypads, which is also gives advantage for making calls, but not so easy when you need to type a few words.
The new version of Google Mobile App, which is bundled with speech recognition technology designed to understand different languages. It places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone’s home screen, permitting you to search using your voice or by typing.
Search by voice on mobile will now trigger a Google Search as soon as you speak your search query and give you the required results with a high accuracy rate. You can search for anything — from “movie times,” to “fish ‘n chips,” to “masala dosa”. It does not matter if you are in London, Bangalore or China: we will use your location to give you nearby results. And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you do not have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer.
So the next time when you are craving to order a pizza, inquire about a taxi service, call up a florist or in case you want to access the plethora of information available over the internet while you are on the road just use search by voice on GMA on your Nokia S60 phones to initiate a Google Search on your mobile.
In addition to this, Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 also has a smart suggest feature which suggests search terms query, thus minimizing typing in case you are using the cumbersome mobile key board and this result in faster completion of your query term.
The Mountain View, California-based company suggested cautiousness that bringing Mandarin speech recognition to mobile phones had posed an “engineering challenge” and may not always deliver the desired results.
Mandarin speakers can now search by voice for complex queries like 清华大学附近的水煮鱼 (which translates to "water-boiled fish near Tsinghua University").
“Keep in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version,” Google said.
“For example, if you are accustomed to a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent. However, our system will improve over time,” the company said.
Google’s English version of voice search has been fine-tuned to allow for accents from Australia, Britain, India and the United States.
See the videos embedded below to see how it works:
To download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone’s browser.