Mountain View, California — Google on Thursday unleashed two new Android applications that let users dictate actions to their phones and link their phones with information from their desktop Chrome browser. The search engine giant announced the addition of “Voice Actions” to its Android 2.2 Froyo search capabilities, as well as introduced a new Chrome extension for Android users called “Chrome to Phone”.
The search engine giant unleashed an application that allows people to easily sending links from its Chrome browser on a PC to an Android phone, and added 12 more voice-activated commands to have Android-based smartphones do tasks such as send email or fetch driving directions.
Google has rolled out an application that lets people use voice commands on Android-based smartphones. (Credit: AFP)
The company introduced the new application at an event at its San Francisco offices. The new tools garner the benefits of cloud computing, which considerably expands the computing power of mobile phones with the help of faster and more responsive wireless networks, Google said.
The Voice Actions program will only function on devices running on the latest Android 2.2 software, named as Froyo.
“Voice Actions are a sequence of spoken commands that let you control your phone using your voice,” Google product manager Hugo Barra and engineering manager Dave Burke said in a blog post on Thursday.
“Nevertheless, our phones do carry out all these new task, but the most natural way of interacting with a phone remains what it always has been: speaking.”
Broadly speaking, Voice commands are nothing new, but Google has placed them to interesting use in its latest update to the Android platform. By adding a number of spoken commands to the Android platform, users should be able to perform certain actions faster — and without the need to touch the keyboard.
Google explained several of those actions. (See embedded video below.) For example, “To use Voice Actions, tap the microphone button on the Google search box on your home screen, or press down for a few seconds on the physical search button on your phone to activate the ‘Speak Now’ screen.” Once you have done that, Android users can say, “Send text to Bob Bobson.” The device will open the text messaging application and then allow you to dictate a message to that person.
Altogether, there are 12 voice actions in the app, not including voice Web search, which has been around for a while. One of the most fascinating ones is “note to self,” which generates an e-mail sent to yourself after you hit the microphone button and say “note to self” followed by the text of your note.
Other functions that would enable users to listen to music, call businesses or contacts, send emails, open Web sites, navigate to businesses, obtain directions and call up maps.
Furthermore to the Voice Actions, Google also enhanced the search widget for the Android platform. The new widget will offer suggestions as users type for nearby businesses, such as restaurants complete with addresses and ratings.
These new capabilities are currently available only for U.S. English, and will be included out of the box with the new Motorola Droid 2. Users of other Android 2.2 devices, such as the Nexus One, EVO 4G or Droid, will need to go to the Android Market and download separate applications to enable all these features. The company detailed the new Voice Search actions in a blog post.
The other new capabilities Google unveiled is a new Chrome extension for Android users called “Chrome to Phone”. This feature allows someone searching for driving directions on the desktop, for instance, to click a little mobile phone icon in his or her Chrome extensions list and have that information sent directly to the Android phone, where it will automatically activate that particular application.
The following clip shows you how to use it: