Google Voice App Only for North Americans?
By now everyone is familiar with the Google app featuring voice recognition for the iPhone. The app was announced by Google on Friday, supposed to appear on Saturday, but when it didn’t, everyone thought Apple was playing spoil sport. Everything finally settled down when the update finally made it to the app store, voice recognition and everything.
The problem is, while most of the reviews were raving about it, I couldn’t get it to recognize most of my search queries. Searching for “Smoking Apples” brought out a result of “clothes shopping” (and many more weird results). Then I stumbled upon this article on the Cult of Mac, which mentions that Google warns the user that the app works best with North American accents.
When you switch on Voice Search in Google’s Mobile App for iPhone, you see a little bit of warning text underneath which reads:
“Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents.”
So forget my Indian accent. The app has problems with any accent that is not an american one. Even that BBC news-reporter will have a hard time getting the voice search to work.
I then tried some kind of an american accent and voila, “Uninstalling iPhone application” returned the exact result. There is no way that I’m going to force myself to change my accent to suit the app. Given the limited utility otherwise (there’s nothing in the app you can’t do with Safari), I’m going to have to take it off my home screen.
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What they will do is any accent that isn’t “North American” they will build a database of alternative terms based on what people say is the correct term and what they click on. Basically, page ranking their own database against your voice.
Neilio November 19th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
No wonder I couldn’t get the damn thing to work. I thought I had a very clear accent and here I was getting weird results. if what Nelio says is true though then I’m guessing we’ll have to check back in a month or two…
Marlene November 19th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Well, these voice services have this accent issue and that is why they aren’t gathering too much acceptance.
@Preshit, remember our discussion while coming back from IIT?
Manan November 20th, 2008 at 12:10 am