socialmedian: Google Voice Search Goes To China (And Nokia Gets It Too)

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Google Voice Search Goes To China (And Nokia Gets It Too)

Source: TechCrunch

Nov 02, 2009

Summary

One of the biggest sources of new searches in the coming years for Google will come from mobile devices, which is why it is attacking mobile on multiple fronts—with Android phones, mobile apps, and mobile search across multiple devices. One of its more impressive efforts lately has been around voice search. Not every phone has a touchscreen or a full keyboard, and some languages simply aren’t keyboard-friendly, and that is where voice search comes in extra handy.

Google already has impressive voice search capabilities on the iPhone, Android, and other phones in English. But today, it is extending voice search to Mandarin Chinese and to older Nokia S60 series phones. There are so many different accents and nuances to spoken Chinese, which is the most popular language in the world, that getting the speech-to-text good enough to return relevant searches is a huge challenge.

I don’t speak Chinese so I can’t evaluate how good a job Google does with Chinese voice search (perhaps some of our readers who know Mandarin can give it a whirl and tell us their impress

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