Google
has made good on its promise of improved voice search on Apple’s iOS
operating system. On Tuesday, the company released a new Google Search
app that brings natural language voice search to the iPhone and iPad.
A
rival to Apple’s own Siri intelligent agent, Google’s app provides
contextual answers to voice queries, along with pertinent Web search
results. Those answers aren’t manually curated; they’re simply the
Internet’s best guess. But thanks to Google’s Knowledge Graph — a sort
of storehouse of semantic-search information — they seem to be generally
pretty accurate. During a Monday demo, Google product manager Hugo Barr
showed the Android version of voice search correctly and quickly
providing information about local movie times and answering questions
like, “What is a baby kangaroo called?”
While
the app doesn’t have the same system-level integration as Siri, it
appears to be well integrated with Google services like YouTube and
Maps, ably offering directions to the locations I asked of it and
pulling up query-relevant YouTube videos. It’s also very fast. Overall,
an impressive effort and one that will certainly keep Apple on its toes.
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