Mountain View, California — In its relentless quest to maintain its position as the de facto resource for searching information on the Internet, global search engine behemoth Google Inc. debuted an array of enhancements to its flagship search box on Tuesday, with new features for both mobile searchers, desktop searchers adding voice queries, drag-and-drop image search and background preloading of the top result page to make search faster and more interesting.
The company, on Tuesday at its Inside Search event in San Francisco, took the wraps off several new features that has bolstered its world-domineering search service once again, alongside minor updates to its mobile web search functionality.
First up, the voice search service for desktop computers, which the Web giant launched, which was earlier available on mobile platforms like iOS and Android is now available on desktop computers.
Voice Search on the desktop moves computing one step closer to the natural user interface that has been the holy grail of computing for decades. With Voice Search, people query Google by speaking aloud. A tiny mic icon appears in the search bar. When clicked, a built-in or hooked-up mic will let you bark out some search terms and Google will pop off to find results online.
Google Voice Search for the desktop (Credit: Google)
“The lust for knowledge does not ends when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device.” “In the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years’ worth of voice to our system,” Google fellow Amit Singhal said in a blog post.
A Google employee demonstrated the power of the voice analysis with complex requests like “pictures of the yellow-bellied warbler” and “weather for Schenectady, New York”. The speech recognition feature is useful for difficult-to-spell words and long phrases, according to Google.
Basically, Voice Search on desktop works by utilizing Google’s Speech API and will be available to anyone using Chrome 11 in English when it is “released over the next week”, Johanna Wright, Google’s director of search product management, said in another blog post. The feature, which will be released for 40 languages, also requires a working internal or external microphone. And, for now, it is only available in U.S. English.
“We have endowed tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology — for instance, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say,” Singhal wrote.
In an interview, Singhal said Google’s voice recognition technology is far beyond search and that the company wishes to make voice input a ubiquitous component of computing, and will eventually become a staple of services like Google Docs.
“The way we think about voice is that it is an intuitive way for human beings to interact with other human beings or even with phones and computers,” he said.
“When you have a voice recognition system that is available everywhere, you just do not think about whether I can talk to this application or not, whether I should type here or talk here. With our vision behind voice, we want to make voice search ubiquitous. But not just voice search, we want to make voice input ubiquitous as well.”
Another excellent new feature is the ability to search with an image. Search by Image empowers people to use a picture rather than text to submit a query. Users can drag-and-drop an image into the search box or copy and paste the image’s URL into the search bar. Google will analyze your image and find some handy results related to the image.
One example Google demonstrated during its presentation on Tuesday was using the Search By Image function to determine the exact location where vacation photos were snapped. Google plans to roll the new service out to users in 40 languages immediately.
“The application behind Search by Image examines your image to determine its most distinctive points, lines and textures and creates a mathematical model. We match that model against billions of images in our index, and page analysis helps us derive a ‘best guess’ text description of your image,” Wright said.
Google’s Search by Image feature allows people to use a picture rather than text to submit a search query. Photo credit: (CNET News)
In addition, Google plans to release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will allow users to right-click any image on the web to conduct a search. Google’s Search By Image application is very similar to the reverse image lookup service like TinEye, developed by Toronto’s Idee Inc.
Below, watch some videos explaining how the new features work:
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