Late last night, Google's expected update to their mobile app was finally pushed from Apple's servers. The update brings the much anticipated voice search feature along with a redesigned interface. The update is free and you can grab it from the App Store.
The voice recognition feature was actually very accurate most of the time. It picked up "My Apple Guide" without a hitch and even when we tried extremely long searches such as "Who was the 25th president of the United States?" and calculations such as "60 degrees in radians", it still did great. The searches are location aware and hence if you say "pizza", it will give you local results for pizza with easy links to call or get directions.
The biggest disappointment however is that voice search does not search your address book. However, if you use the keyboard, it also queries your address book. This might debunk theories that Google is actually performing the search locally on the device and not sending it to external servers.
Here are a few tips covered in Google's video below:
- Tap on the little magnifying glass beside the search field and you can choose to search: Maps, images, News, Shopping and Wikipedia
- Double tap the magnifying glass Icon at the bottom to bring up the keyboard.
- You can use landscape mode by turning on Screen Rotation under the Settings Pane (This however disables motion sensing with Voice Search, so you will have to press the button manually)
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