Apple’s Siri has, for long, been hailed as the best commercial voice-based personal assistant available on a mobile device. But this may be about to change, with Google having updated its Voice Search with excellent new tools. The new features that are now a part of Google Voice Search are detailed below.
Google has a distinct advantage over virtually every other company. The search giant is able to get help from its immense search engine structure. And that is precisely what Google is doing when updating the Voice Search.
Context, follow-up questions:
Remember when you asked a personal assistant how the weather was and it told you the right answer? Well, that’s old stuff. The updated Voice Search not only lets you ask such questions but remembers them so that if your next query is related to the last query, the Search remembers the context and responds accordingly.
For instance, if you ask Google Voice Search to look up ‘Bagel recipes’ and then your next query is ‘How much do they cost?’, the Search will promptly tell you bagel rates at your nearby food outlets. This is fairly amazing.
Location-based reminders:
Imagine this: you have to go to the grocery store and pick a dozen eggs and a carton of milk. You don’t want to forget this, so you put up a reminder. With the updated Google Voice Search, you can now set location-based reminders so that when you walk into the grocery store, Voice Search automatically reminds you that it’s time to pick up the eggs and milk.
This is an excellent new feature which can be immensely useful in many different situations. From personal life to work schedules, location-based reminders can go a long way in helping one organize his life better.
Responding to questions and statements:
The Voice Search now responds not only to common one or two-word queries but also to entire questions and statements. And the best part is that it is able to understand these questions and statements well and respond accordingly.
For instance, if you were to ask Voice Search ‘butter vs olive oil’, it would display an entire chart comparing the nutritional details of both. You can also make other unusual queries, even ask the Voice Search ‘Tell me about Nobel Peace Prize winners’ and it would display a list of Nobel Peace Prize winners in no time.
According to the Google team, it has implemented a new ‘Hummingbird algorithm‘ which has made such advanced search features possible for Voice Search. With these new features, it is certainly valid of Google to claim that its Voice Search has surpassed Siri. The Search app is available for both iPhone and iPad now.
Source: Google
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