Mountain View, California — In its relentless endeavor to make searching the Web from mobile devices easier, Google, last weekend made some enhancements via voice instead of typing, added search-by-voice for Google Maps and transit directions on Google Android-powered mobile devices.
Rather than typing, users can search Google Maps for Android by entering their destination queries via voice, including home addresses, businesses and other locations.
For beginners, users can now search for a place on Google Maps by simply saying it out loud. Speak your question, and Google will search it up for you — provided you have an American, Australian, or British accent.
For now, it is set up to interpret English in American, Australian, and British Accents.
“After search is made through voice command, you will see a map of places,” Ole CaveLie and Chandan Pitta, Google software engineers, wrote in a blog post. “To help you decide where to go, we have improved our business listings to include content such as store hours, prices, ratings, and reviews.”
Once a user spoken a search query with their voice, Google Maps for Android will present a map of places to them. Google’s voice recognition engine, which was first introduced for iPhone users in fall 2008 and then finally fro Android users in February, is a key enhancement for the future of mobile computing.
In addition, some enhancements also have been made to Google Latitude in Google Maps for Android.
The search engine giant has also kindly added transit and walking directions to Google Maps for Android. The improvement empowers you to avail public transportation info for more then 250 cities, and walking directions for pedestrians to better hoof it around urban jungles, including New York and San Francisco.
“Now, once you select “Detect your location” from the Latitude privacy menu, your location will continue to update as long as your phone is on,” according to the blog.
Specific cities can be found here. “If you are looking for the best route on foot, use walking directions to take advantage of pedestrian-only pathways and to avoid one-way restrictions — just in time for summer,” Google says in a post on the Google Mobile Blog.
Google also boasts a new experimental Google Latitude feature called “Updates” that allows users communicate with friends and post messages through the program: “Start Latitude and click the “Updates” tab to shout out updates at friends when they are at interesting locations, begin a conversation when you are at your favorite restaurant, or simply add more details to your Latitude location for your friends to see,” wrote CaveLie and Pitta in the post.
Nevertheless, unlike other Android software updates, the new Google Maps release would not be automatically pushed to users’ T-Mobile G1 or HTC Magic phones over the next few days. Friends and users would require to download the latest release of Google Maps for Android for this to function.
Google also recently unveiled a faster, easier-to-use beta version of iGoogle for the iPhone and Android devices. This build supports tabs and other gadgets, but those with Flash would not work on iPhone and Android handhelds.