Monday, November 5, 2012

Google‘s Siri Rival Now Available for iOS

Google has made good on its promise of improved voice search on Apple’s iOS operating system. On Tuesday, the company released a new Google Search app that brings natural language voice search to the iPhone and iPad.
A rival to Apple’s own Siri intelligent agent, Google’s app provides contextual answers to voice queries, along with pertinent Web search results. Those answers aren’t manually curated; they’re simply the Internet’s best guess. But thanks to Google’s Knowledge Graph — a sort of storehouse of semantic-search information — they seem to be generally pretty accurate. During a Monday demo, Google product manager Hugo Barr showed the Android version of voice search correctly and quickly providing information about local movie times and answering questions like, “What is a baby kangaroo called?”

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While the app doesn’t have the same system-level integration as Siri, it appears to be well integrated with Google services like YouTube and Maps, ably offering directions to the locations I asked of it and pulling up query-relevant YouTube videos. It’s also very fast. Overall, an impressive effort and one that will certainly keep Apple on its toes.

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