The NY Times reports that today Google is expected to release a free voice-recognition application that will allow iPhone users to submit their queries verbally, rather than by typing them using the iPhone’s virtual keyboard.  The app will be available from the iTunes store.

This is not to be confused with their GOOG-411 busines directory assistance service, which launched last year.  Google’s new voice service will attempt to answer any query you pose.

Microsoft and Yahoo each already have voice search capabilities.  Is this yet another example of Google getting PR exposure for something that others have already done?  Maybe, but I can point to 2 reasons why I bet Google will do voice search better than their competitors:

(1) They’ve already done a dress-rehearsal with GOOG-411.

“You may have heard about our 1-800-GOOG-411 service.  Whether or not free 411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen.  I myself am somewhat skeptical.  The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.  The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation.  So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that.  So 1-800-GOOG-411 is about that: Getting a bunch of different speech samples so that when you call up or we’re trying to get the voice out of video, we can do it with high accuracy.”

(2) Google can anayze a bigger database of queries than Yahoo and Microsoft combined. Thus, they’re going to be better-positioned to figure out what an iPhone user actually wants when he/she says “paris hilton” — a French hotel or a celeb.

Update, November 17 - Looks like the app will be available Monday, November 17 instead.  Apparently Apple was in no hurry to clear it for release.

Update, November 18 - Michael Arrington of TechCrunch tested it and says overall, it went pretty well.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on November 14, 2008 - 11:54 am

Comments (1) | More Apple, Google Posts