The brouhaha over the voice search capability in the latest version of Google's new iPhone app.

Google announced a new version of their Google Mobile app for the iPhone a week ago, touting two new capabilities: basing searches on your current location, and allowing you to enter search text using your voice.

The problem was, Apple hadn't yet approved the app for download, and it wasn't available via the iTunes "App Store" when the announcement was made.

Could this lack of coordination between Apple and Google have something to do with Google's recent introduction of the iPhone-rivaling Android phone? Just a thought (or a conspiracy theory)...

Well, the kinks were all worked out and the wheels (and palms?) were all properly greased, so on Monday (11/17/2008) the voice-enabled Google Mobile app for the iPhone was made available at the App Store.


As a test, I channeled Kramer and said "Why don't you just tell me the name of the movie?" into the phone. On the first try, it didn't quite recognize what I said, but on the second try it did, and found several references to the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer pretends to be the Moviefone guy.

The verdict: it's a fun party trick to demonstrate to your friends how frigging cool your phone is—much like identifying a song by holding the iPhone up to a speaker using Shazam, or shaking the iPhone while running the UrbanSpoon app to find local restaurants. But the accuracy of the voice recognition is variable, something Google acknowledges. Still, for a first release, the functionality is pretty good.

One complaint is that the app seems to have trouble recognizing British accents. Oh well, those people should just learn to speak English... :-)