Thread: Google India: Voice Search on Mobiles

Google India's latest service offers free voice-based internet search on mobiles. The service is currently limited to about 400,000 Blackberry mobile users.

The Business Standard reports:

Right now, Google is struggling to reconcile India’s variegated accents and pronunciation with the search engines. “Accents are indeed a problem, and we are working towards improving the application,” said Vinay Goel, head of products, Google India.

Google has had problems with accents before – see iPhones and British Accents are Incompatible.

In India, more people are accessing the internet via their mobile phones than personal computers.

Mobiles (slightly over 415 million) outnumber personal computers (PCs — slightly over 30 million) in India.

Has anyone from INForum tested out Google's voice search before?

I think 'accents" are going to be a big problem for some time to come, not a technology I will be embracing for the foreseeable future.

BTW VoiceSearch.co.in is available if anybody wants to take the plunge.

Very interesting development.

However, the fact that Google needs to use operators to provide this service shows that voice recognition still has a long way to go.