In an effort to promote extreme laziness, Google’s Mobile iPhone app now supports voice recognition. Hate your iPhone keyboard? Now you can just speak your search terms. But does it work?
Gizmodo gave it a solid review, touting the app’s ability to recognize even small differences between words (“bear” and “bare”). We’re less enthusiastic. Mostly because yesterday we messed around with this app and successfully executed only one accurate voice search–for “GIANT magazine” (it took no less than five attempts). More often than not, the voice recognition would either 1) not understand or 2) returned search results that were a awkward interpretation of what we had spoken. Oh, it found “Google.” Cool?
Today’s tests, however, returned quite a few successful searches. Maybe it’s learning. Maybe it’s been covertly studying our speech patterns. Maybe it has plans of world annihilation. Hmmm… Here’s a list of 10 test search terms that we spoke to Google Mobile’s iPhone-based voice recognition–as well as the sometimes accurate, sometimes totally wrong search terms that the app displayed as results.
1. James Bond (Success!)
2. Beyonce Knowles (It found “Beyonce and Nobles”)
3. Quantum of Solace (It found “F-150 shocks”)
4. Solange Knowles (It found “cardinals”)
5. Gears of War 2 (Success!)
6. Chinese Democracy (Success!)
7. The Urban Daily (It found “The Urban Belly”)
8. Wu-Tang Clan (Success!)
9. Put a Ring on It (It found “Flickering on it”)
10. Barack Obama (Success!)






