MacMost Now 161: iPhone Voice Search with Google

The free Google app now allows you to search the Web by speaking into your iPhone. It will attempt to translate what you say into text and search the Web or pinpoint a location on the map.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now.  Want to see something really cool?
So every once in a while, something really simple but really cool comes along, and I just got to share it with you.  Google has an iPhone app that allows you to search Google and access some of their apps through a free application.  I'll put a link to it in the show notes.  But they just updated it, changing its interface.  Instead of typing, you can now talk to it.
So let me show you.  Here's the Google application.  All you need to do now is hold the iPhone up to your ear and speak the certain term you want it to search for.  'Macintosh tutorials.'  It will go ahead and analyze your voice and perform the search.  Clicking on one of these will then take you to the webpage.
Now let's try something else.  'Pizza.'  Now not only will it use the word that I spoke, but it's also going to use my GPS location to find pizza places that are near me.
Now let's go ahead and change where we search.  We'll go to 'Maps' and we'll try again.  'Mexican restaurant'.  Now it'll return a list of results like before.  But this time, when we click on them, we'll go to the iPhone Maps application and it'll show you the locations of the places you searched for.  Here you go.
Unfortunately, one of the potentially coolest things doesn't quite work it.  It's the ability to be able to search your contacts.  By default, it's set to iPhone and the web, and if you speak somebody's name, it should give you their contact information and basically be one step away from voice dialing.  However, it doesn't work with voice recognition.  It does work if you type into the Google application, so we know it's just around the corner.
Now you can also use this to search for anything that you usually search Google for.  So maybe you want to do a conversion or a calculation.  Look at episode #140 of MacMost Now to see some examples.
The app also gives you some alternatives, so if you speak something and it doesn't get it quite right, you can click on the button and it will list things that it thought it might have been, but it wasn't its first choice.
If you like quick little tips like this, you can find more of them in the MacMost email newsletter, which comes out every Thursday.  You can subscribe to it at MacMost.com/newsletter.  I usually include a quick tip and also a featured iPhone application and a featured Mac OS X application that I like.  So check it out.  Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig, with MacMost Now.

Show Notes:
You can find the Google iPhone app in our iPhone Apps directory.

MacMost Now 161: iPhone Voice Search with Google

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