Google iPhone App Already Lists Voice Function, but It's Not There
As reported by the New York Times, Google's iPhone application will soon get voice functionality, allowing users to speak a search term, which is then transmitted to Google's servers, recognized (theoretically), then entered as a search term. Geez... is the iPhone's virtual keyboard that bad?
According to the report:
"The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google?s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.
"The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location."
A quick check of the iPhone App Store's Google app listing reveals that voice functionality is already listed in the tool's description, but no voice functionality actually exists (as far as we can tell) once the app is downloaded.
The App Store description reads: "Voice search - speak your queries instead of typing them. [...] Voice Search is supported only on iPhone, and works best for North American English accents. Other languages coming soon."
as someone who's been an iPhone user for a couple weeks now I would answer that the touchscreen keyboard IS that bad in the cases where you are not able to use it in landscape orientation (wider keyboard) - Google search allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode and so it actually isn't that bad in that case....
surprisingly, Apple's own mail app and other instances of keyboard input DO NOT allow landscape mode and I hope this changes sometime very SOON
for now I'm routing all my email through GMAIL webmail which besides allowing for landscape keyboard also allows for basic organizational filtering and better spam filtering which the Apple email app lacks