Don’t just love David vs Goliath stories, when a little guy beats the big bully? On the similar note, we caught a press release from ChaCha. Apparently, MSearchGroove found that ChaCha’s voice-enabled mobile search “proved superior” to two other options for the iPhone: the Google Mobile App and Yahoo Mobile App.
This, of course, shouldn’t come as a surprise as in most cases it’s humans who interpreted the search query for ChaCha, as opposed to voice-to-text technology in case of Yahoo and Google.
From the press release:
According to the study, ChaCha interpreted natural language search queries, that is, queries asked as questions, accurately in 94.4% of the tests and delivered an accurate search result in 88.9% of cases. The Google voice recognition technology interpreted queries accurately in 16.7% of tests and delivered accurate search results in 22.2% of tests. The Vlingo for iPhone voice recognition technology correctly interpreted queries in 72.2 % of cases and delivered accurate results (via Yahoo!) in 27.8% of tests.
For the evaluation purposes, the researchers asked a series of 18 queries representative of six typical mobile search categories: Navigational, Directions, Information Local, Information General, Social, and Long-Tail. For each query the researchers evaluated nine performance characteristics including response time, results accuracy, voice recognition accuracy, number of results received, keytaps required, relevancy of the result, location awareness, use of advertising, and presence of other value-added features. Moreover, researchers also conducted two rounds of tests, using both natural language (speaking the questions in sentences) and keyword (reducing questions to a few specific terms) queries, and ChaCha outperformed the two other contenders here as well…
Those who want to know more, the full report waits you as a free download from MSearchGroove’s website.