If you own a Android powered smartphone then you will be please to know that Google has introduced a new feature called Google Voice Action.
Google Voice Action lets the user speak to their smartphone using the voice command feature, which then shows the results appearing on the screen. Voice Actions are a series of spoken commands that let you control your phone using your voice. Call businesses and contacts, send texts and email, listen to music, browse the web, and complete common tasks, all just by speaking into your phone.
This new feature has come about after Google realised that one in every four searches were made via voice on the Android smartphone.
It has also been revealed by Google that this new feature will be built into any smartphone which will run on Google’s newest OS, Android 2.2, Froyo.
Take a look at the video yourself to see how Google Voice Action works:
One thought on “Android 2.2 Smartphones to Include New Feature: Google Voice Action”
Well, this all looks pretty fantastic. I have been an enthusiastic user of Dragon/ScanSoft Naturally Speaking voice recognition software for many years and could simply not live without it so was keen to try this. It may be that since I have an English accent of an older man rather than the squeaky American accent of the presenter on the video, but its ability to recognise my voice is pretty poor. That is just for the Google voice search app. Sadly there appears to be no way to train the program (as you have to do with Naturally Speaking), and so the recognition accuracy which I find to be about one word in four (whereas with Naturally Speaking I run at about 120 words per minute with 1-2 mistakes per hundred words or so) which makes it pretty unusable as an app.
Great idea, but must try harder. There must be many android customers who do not have the ability to speak like a young chirpy good-looking computer nerd!