#GOOGLE VOICE ACTIONS FOR ANDROID ANDROID#

The other major impediment is Microsoft’s mixed message surrounding the “Natural User Interface.” Its attempt to leapfrog the pack involves adding “gestures,” exemplified by the full-body involvement of game-players using a feature called Kinect on the xBox.

#GOOGLE VOICE ACTIONS FOR ANDROID ANDROID#

One is the overall lack of traction around Windows Phone 7, which is one of several candidates for third place behind iPhone and Android in race for smarphone marketshare (with the largely non-voice-aware Blackberry is the same boat). But Microsoft’s marketing efforts will be hampered by two major issues. It can be argued that the Colossus of Redmond beat Google to the punch a couple of weeks ago at SpeechTEK when Zig Serafin, general manager of the Speech Group at Microsoft, showcased a set of speech-enabled features for the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Perhaps more ominously, Google seems to be making the statement that it plans to compete with a crop of fledgling speech-enabled service providers, like PhoneTell, a company that developed some nifty mashups of voice search and call handling on Android phones, in part because there has been less friction involved in invoking and gaining access to the speech processing and call processing features in the Andoid SDK. The set of services has been seen as a direct competitive foray against the native, speech-enabled features on Apple’s iPhone (including the services that may spring from Apple’s acquisition of Siri), as well as the myriad of multi-platform applications from Nuance (Dragon), Vlingo, Promptu and even AT&T. This is a combination (I’d say “recombination”) of Google’s formidable speech recognition and dictation capabilities with Google Maps and various flavors of Google Search which, unlike Wave, takes a major focus on the user experience, especially for mobile phones. But, this is not like Google Wave, where some of the most creative minds in collaborative computing and messaging invented and launched a platform to show the virtues of sharing on-screen information in real time with little attention to the actual user experience. As head engineer for the Voice Actions project at Google, Mike LeBeau is quite adept at using the services in ways that are designed to impress and amaze. This being a demo, your own experience may be different.

On new handsets (running the so-called “Froyo” - the Android 2.2 operating system), users will be able to initiate voice dialing, voice search (which equates to a Yellow Pages search based on Google Maps), messaging capabilities, music search and selection, and even map search and directions at the push of a single button, as depicted in this video demo: From a functional point of view, it is the superset of speech-enabled mobile services. While I was in Canada on vacation, Google stocked the Android App store with a set of new “Voice Actions” Applications.

Google voice actions for android