Gadgetory

search is undergoing a lot of big changes lately Google is still the big leader with more than sixty seven percent market share in the US but things are moving from the desktop to mobile and wearable devices and the game is getting more wide open now google just announced that google now its voice search would be available on apple's ios i'm dan farber and i'm joined by seth rosenblatt and covers this subject matter for cnet so what is the significance of google now coming to iOS sure well Google now is a predictive search and a voice recognition app it's natively built into android 4.1 and above and it allows Google to not only do voice recognition very easily very simply where you talk to the phone you can send text messages and stuff like that and it's very accurate with its recognition it's also predictive search so if you have in your calendar for example a plane trip from San Francisco to New York it will tell you you know what the traffic is like on the way to the airport before you even ask for it in New York it will have hotels listed if you don't have one built into your calendar if you're into sports it will recognize that you are in San Francisco and we'll pull in Giants scores or the 49er scores so basically where do you think Google now Siri mm-hmm there's another one Sherpa that came out of Latin America where are these all heading because you don't see a lot of people talking to their desktops you don't see a lot of people necessarily talking to their phones at this point sure well I think one of the very interesting developments that's going on is with google glass the ability for google and these other services to recognize what you say as you're as you're speaking with very little lag time means that device is where you're no longer holding it in your hand where it's something that's just worn on your clothing or worn on your face i think is a real game-changer if you don't have to pull out your phone out of your pocket that that means you're basically living with the computer instead of interfacing with the computer in more cold way no kind of talk about you know all the predictive solutions and answers it can give you but what are the limitations at this point well at this point Google would say that the limitations i think our are fairly significant although they have told us that there is that in the past year alone the first year of google now they've made fifteen to thirty five percent increase in improvement in voice recognition so they clearly see the glass as not even being anywhere near half full and they are clearly going full full speed ahead with this it's also very notable that larry page last week in their earnings call brought up the fact that Google now is a big thing for them he didn't talk about much else he talked about google glass he talked about some of the other projects that they're working on google fiber but fact that he called out google now not chrome and none of the any other services that that they're working on indicates that the voice recognition in the predictive search of google now is extremely important to the company and this is all kind of tied into what google has called a knowledge graph which is a train um trying to identify all these entities so to speak so that it understands when you say king yeah to try to figure out the context about what kind of King do you mean right whether you're talking about the kings of sports team or whether you're talking about the king of Thailand or whomever you know King Street there's a lot of different ways that that can be interpreted another big problem that they're wrestling with is accents you know the ability for the knowledge graph to recognize what you're saying and what that means when you're speaking with a different inflection then what could be described as standard American English so the glass is half full I think Google would say the glasses and even anywhere near handful and what about Siri just to finish up sure well what Apple is doing with Siri is slightly different so far it's pretty much limited to voice recognition um but it does have different their integration with the phone where you can jostle the phone and get Syria to to activate you can also just save you know hey Siri and Cirie will activate so that kind of technology has google hasn't yet put directly into its Android systems but honestly if if they announced that in a few weeks at Google i/o I wouldn't be surprised oh great thanks Seth thank you Dan foreseen it I'm Dan Farber thanks for watching