January 27, 2008

Souljah Boy to TellMe: Search, Listen and Obey

Machine translation from voice to text promises to be the grail of local mobile search. Michael Fitzgerald in The New York Times today highlights voice search and voice recognition software in gadgets that "Listen and Obey."

For example, with the new Vlingo app (Microsoft TellMe competitor), searchers can speak into their mobile phones send SMS messages to find and download Souljah Boy Tellem songs. Instead of texting a friend to decide on a sushi restaurant, Vlingo Find (integrated with Yahoo Maps) lets you talk it over and pinpoint the restaurant of choice.

Listen and obey? That's optimistic. Voice recognition still can't guess users intentions easily. Om Malik discussed Vlingo way back in August 2007, but we're glad the Times is highlighting innovations in mobile search and local search.

Plus, voice search won't achieve ubiquity until it's faster to talk than type.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 10:48 AM | Permalink

January 21, 2008

AT&T iPhone Google Deal Pits Apple Against Blackberry

Pitting Apple against Blackberry, AT&T will offer a corporate plan for iPhone users, Engadget reported today.

The iPhone Google AT&T alliance made news at MacWorld with the launch of new Google apps and features for the iPhone.

Today's announcement, though, may be the biggest search engine industry news to come out of MacWorld. If the iPhone succeeds in dislodging Blackberry from the enterprise -- and Google maintains its iPhone-Apple ties -- then Google's share of local mobile searches could increase significantly over the next two years.

Google doesn't enjoy the same dominance in local mobile search as in desktop search. Google's strategic business development deals a couple years ago bundled Google desktop search with Dell computers and made Google the default home page on the computer's pre-installed browser.

Engadget blogger Thomas Ricker notes the move by AT&T iPhone comes in lieu of a 3G announcement by Apple. 3G, with service at 5-10 Mb per second, would make wide-area wireless voice telephony and broadband wireless data available in mobile.

With faster speeds and more bandwidth, 3G would likely increase the total volume of local mobile searches.

Increasing the number of searches is the only win-win for the search industry. Slicing and dicing search inventory increases the long tail of searches. With Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask battling for small gains against Google's dominant share of searches, local mobile search -- and the enterprise -- may be the final frontier.

Posted by Kevin Heisler at 12:06 PM | Permalink

January 28, 2007

Midomi a New Entrant in the Growing Voice Search Market

The just launched Midomi search engine combines voice search with a social network. Anyone with a microphone hooked to their computer can search or add to the database by singing, humming or whistling their favorite tune. Midomi uses a proprietary Multimodal Adaptive Recognition System (MARS) Search developed by Melodis Corporation. According to Melodis, the MARS Search analyzes each element independently and adapts to the stronger components. For instance, MARS Search takes speech content into account if the user sings the lyrics and ignores speech content if the user hums or whistles the song.

There is a social networking component to the site. Users who have created a profile can sing their favorite songs, share them with others and add them to the search engine's music database. Midomi.com provides users a system to rate the performances of other users, view their photos, and send them messages.

This new entrant joins a rapidly filling market, for earlier this month we wrote about Nayio, another voice search engine. VentureBeat offers results of their testing and concludes that Midomi is the stronger entrant with a better recognition algorithm.

Posted by Amanda Watlington at 10:44 PM | Permalink

December 26, 2006

Google Maps Offers Speech-Friendly Alternatives

Over at the Google blog, Googler T.V. Raman shares useful tips as a technologist who is visually impaired.

For blind searchers and others who use spoken outputs, screenreaders or a Braille display, the visual display that is returned from a Google Maps or Google Local search is often translated poorly in such readers.

So Google has added a simple, alternative view into Google Maps for visually impaired users, with the Textual Maps UI. It's also extremely useful for any searcher using a non-graphical display and can quickly look up a location by typing a simple English query of the form of a start address to end address.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 2:31 PM | Permalink

October 9, 2006

Cingular Wireless Voice-Enabled Mobile Local Search

More and more directory assistance (DA) is starting to morph into voice-enabled mobile (local) search. This piece in the NY Times over the weekend describes a new deal between automated voice services company Tellme Networks and Cingular Wireless for an expanded service that will offer a range of options that are much broader than current DA. Here's a previous post about how directory assistance call volumes indicate mobile search category demand.

Here's more discussion of voice, DA and the mobile user experience on my blog.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 10:11 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2005

Another Service To Read Feeds & Search Results

Gary wrote recently of Speakwire and Speegle, which let you listen to rather than read RSS feeds and search results. Advanced Chatbot Solutions offers similar services. The company's NewsBot Demo lets you enter any feed and then watch and hear as "Halo" reads the feed contents back to you. Want search results read to you? Visit the home page, then click on the "Talk to Halo" link on the left-hand side of the page. A new window will appear. Once you see Halo, click on the link below her image. Then type in "google" plus the words you want to search for, such as "google cars." You'll then be read the first result from Google. Oddly, however, the number of results listed within the chatbot demo I've found will be much lower than what Google reports.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:29 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

Speakwire Adds New Feature, Listen to Any RSS Feed

A quick update to my post from last week about Speakwire's new service that allows you to "listen" to RSS feeds. When I wrote the post, one of the issues with the service (I heard from several of you about this) is that it only worked for selected feeds. As of today, Speakwire now allows you to listen to any RSS feed. Look for the box near the bottom of the page labeled "custom feed." Enter the feed's url and you're ready to listen. More about Speakwire and its sister service Speegle, here.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:45 AM | Permalink

May 31, 2005

"Hear" Selected RSS Feeds

Don't feel like reading RSS feeds but would rather listen to them?

I just noticed that C.E.C. Systems, the company that provides Speegle, is offering a free service called Speakwire that allows you to have selected RSS feeds read to you using the same synthesized speech technology.

Using Speakwire is easy. Just click what feeds you would like to hear. Unfortuntately, you're not able to Speakwire read "any" feed to you. The service currently makes over 80 feeds available including: + Threadwatch + Slashdot + BBC World News + New York Times Business News + Reuters Entertainment News

You can also have Speakwire remember (sets a cookie) what feeds you would like to have read.

Last Fall, Speegle, another service from C.E.C. Systems that allows you to have your Google search results read to you using one of three synthesized voices got a considerable amount of attention.

Posted by Gary Price at 3:40 PM | Permalink

May 30, 2005

Voice-Activated Search Technology Being Developed In Israel

The Globes [online] site from Israel has a brief article about Maestro, voice-activated search technology, being developed at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

After the search has been executed, the results may be heard either as a list of websites, or by subject. Using voice commands, the user can navigate to the desired site, and listen to its content. Google Voice Search from Google Labs (no longer available) provided voice-activated search via the telephone. Yahoo by Phone allows you to speak your commands into the telephone and receive e-mail, news, weather and other info but does not allow you to search the web. The new version of Opera also offers some voice-activated options.

Speegle, is not a voice-activated search engine but does read your Google results back to you using synthesized speech. We blogged about it late last year.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:32 PM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

A Search Engine that Talks

BBC Online takes a look at Speegle, a search engine that reads (using synthesized speech) Google results to the searcher.

If the look of Speegle reminds you of Google...

Google has no connection with Speegle and the use of bright colours is simply to make the site more visible for those with visual impairments, said [Speegle's Founder] Mr [Gordon] Renton.

"It is not a rip-off. We are doing something that Google does not do and is not planning to do and there is truth in the saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," he said.

Postscript: Google does something like this, or at least did, at Google Voice Search. It was created ages ago but no longer appears to be working.

Posted by Gary Price at 9:21 AM | Permalink

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