Talk to us Google! Google researchers have added voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone. The free application is said to be ready for download in the iTunes library today.

 

Users can ask almost anything their little hearts desire, from “Where can I get a Sponge Bob Square Pants costume?” to “What’s the newest AT&T phone?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s (News - Alert) servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

 

The pure fact that human beings are now capable to speaking to a machine is outstanding and bottom-line something that could come out of a science fiction movie.

 

“One thing that has changed is the amount of computation and the amount of data that is available,” said Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance (News - Alert) Communications before coming to Google.

 

Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who has done pioneering work in voice recognition, said Google’s advantage in this field was the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data. “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months,” he said.

 

“It’s important to understand that machine recognition will never be perfect,” Reddy added. “The question is, How close can they come to human performance?”

 

According to John Markoff of The New York Times, for Google the technology is critical to its next assault on the world of advertising. Google executives said location-based queries would make it possible to charge higher rates for advertisements from nearby businesses, for example, although it is not selling such ads now.

 

“We are dramatically increasing value to the advertiser through location and voice,” said Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft (News - Alert) executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.