Deep Currents

Google just added voice-recognition to its search application for the iPhone. Nifty, right? Very, and what’s even more exciting it’s also a data-gathering system that lets Google assemble the largest-ever collection of human voice samples. That means that Google can build on the sizable database it’s gathered from the voice samples that people have spoken into the information number 1-800-GOOG-411, adding samples for a wide range of spoken search queries. Crunching that data to capture the true range of variation in our speech patterns could take us a great deal closer to truly intuitive spoken interfaces to our computers. 

Written: November 24th, 2008