Mountain View, California — Google is once again taking a cue from desktop speech recognition software, by adding a new service to the “cool but creepy” category. Voice search is an intriguing technology, but it can also produce some questionable results if you do not speak clearly. Global search engine behemoth Google, on Tuesday moved to improve those odds with the launch of personalized voice recognition profiles to Android’s mobile Voice Search app, a feature that will basically learn your voice.
Google’s personalized voice recognition is an opt-in service for voice search on Android 2.2 and higher.”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,” Amir Mane, product manager, and Glen Shires, a member of the Google technical staff, wrote in a blog post.”We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you.”
Although sophisticated, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time,” says the duo on the Google Mobile blog.
Google is quite careful of the possibility to creep people out by remembering their voices. So, the first time you use Voice Search, you will be presented with a dialog to turn on personalized recognition. The company stresses that it “takes your privacy seriously” and explains that if you would like to disassociate your voice recordings from your Google Account, you can do so through the “Speech” section of Google Dashboard. A new privacy initiative was one reason that federal regulators let Google off the hook for accidentally collecting private data through its Street View cars.
It is pathetic, in a way, that as our phones are becoming clever, we are once again beginning to speak into them. As voice commands improve, it is certain that most users would find them preferable to hunting and pecking on touchscreen keyboards. In addition, the new Voice Search app is available on Android phones running version 2.2 of the OS or later. It is unclear if Google will bring the feature to other platforms, or if it even technically can given the restrictions of other mobile platforms.
Nevertheless, for now, the new voice search recognition feature is just for voice search accuracy. Maybe that is all it will ever be for, but we will see. It is currently only available in English in the US, but this will no doubt expand broadly in due time. To get the feature, if you have FroYo or better, simply download the voice search app from the Android Market. There is a QR code here.