We all have those little things when we speak which makes it difficult for speech recognition to fully work – it could be a slight Southern drawl, a bit of a lisp or just unique pronunciations. That’s why Google is adding the ability to personalize your Voice Search app for Android.
According to the Google blog:
If you opt into personalized recognition, we begin to associate the recordings of the words that you ask us to recognize with your Google account. We then automatically use these words to build a speech model specifically for you. This speech model enables us to deliver greater recognition accuracy. Although subtle, accuracy improvements begin fairly quickly and will build over time.
This is a cool new feature of the Voice Search app for Android and it should make the speech-powered program more useful in the long run. I know some of the names in my contact list have given it trouble before, so I’m hoping this will solve that. The Voice Search app for Android is only available in English right now for devices running Froyo and above.
Of course, this may be a bit creepy for some because Google will have your voice patterns associated with your account. You do have the option of turning off the personalization, as well as disassociating your voice recordings from you Google account by going through the Google Dashboard.
I believe that speech recognition will be the next, big battleground in the mobile space and all the big players are positioning themselves accordingly. Apple recently spent about $200 million to acquire Siri and this technology should be baked into iOS soon enough. Google continues to improve its Android voice functions and Microsoft is saying its TellMe technology in Windows Phone 7 products are some of the best in the business.
[Via Google Mobile blog]
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