Google Voice Search May be Coming Soon

vitaly.friedman writes "The master of text-based search could be looking to lend a voice to Internet users everywhere, or so it appears based on Google's latest patent. Patent #7,027,987, issued today by the US Patent and Trademark Office, covers a 'Voice interface for a search engine.'"

Google Voice Search

[tehshen]

Haven't they already done a thing like this [google.com] before? Maybe they've only just patented it. Either way I don't see a story here.

Re:Not necessarily voice search

[afaik_ianal]

Now which is it?

If you had bothered to RTFP, you'd know :P. The patent doesn't explicitly say what type of data you are searching - it just says that it generates a list of weighted hypothesis for what the searcher may have said (i.e. a bunch of text strings with probabilities attached), and forwards them on to a (text-based) search engine.

I'd say they are intending for this to interface with any of the existing google searches (web, images, news, etc). Your idea of searching audio, while interesting, would be completely separate to this patent - if you could generate text indices for the audio files (voice recognition on the audio files), then you could apply this patent.

This patent certainly makes no attempt to provide audio files in the results based on sounds that are similar to the user's audio request.

google labs demo

[rednuhter]

they have a demo (currently down) http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html [google.com]

To try out this demo, please follow these simple steps:

1. Pick up the phone and call the automated voice search system at [phone].

2. After the prompt Say your Search Keywords, say your query to the system.

3. Click this link and a new window will open with your voice search results.

4. Say another query, and the new window with the search results will be updated with the new results.