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Google technician to focus on voice commands | Latest Industry News | News | Opinion, News, Analysis | BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT

07/10/2011

One of Google UK's best-known programmers is to relocate to the company's Mountain View headquarters to help realise the potential of voice-powered search, reports the Guardian.

Dave Burke will make the move to San Francisco as part of the computing giant's push to improve speech recognition technology, after joining the company's UK arm in 2007.

Google's London base has been key to the engineering effort that has gone into Google's Android smartphone platform, the world's best selling mobile operating system.

Although Android phones do accept voice commands for searching, email composition and summoning maps; because accuracy is still low, developers are racing to create technology that will eventually replace touchscreen typing, suggests the Guardian.

A specialist in voice recognition technology, Burke has published a number of academic papers on the subject and had around 80 programmers and engineers reporting to him while in London. Google has said it is 'not able to comment on the internal movements' of its staff.

Apple recently revealed its iPhone 4S, a direct competitor to Google's Android phones.

via bcs.org

An actual interesting piece of insider information from the BCS. I am amazed. On the story itself, I hope Google do something to improve their own voice capabilities. One of the biggest problems for me is the need to be connected to the internet though. My voice commands usually just get stuck in some horrible loop consulting the cloud. I think it will be interesting to see how useful Apples Siri system will actually be. I predict it will be poor.

I seem to recall that my Nokia N70 had excellent voice recognition (considering) and so does Windows 7. Neither of these need a constant connection to the net.

Comments

Dom said…
A gutted, it's been pointed out to me that they didn't break the story. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/06/google-technician-mobile-voice-commandI don't like sites pilfering stories without a link back to where they got it from. It stinks. Obviously there isn't proof but the BCS story is from today and the Guardians from yesterday.
7 October 2011 at 15:02
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