Google Granted Voice Search Patent
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What if you could perform a search just by telling the search engine what you wanted, without needing any speech recognition software at your end? That's the direction Google's recent patent seems to be pointing in. Keep reading to learn about the challenges, and why a product based on this patent could make a big difference to searching and search engine marketing.
Continuing its never-ending quest to take over the world – er, sorry, organize all of the world’s information so that it is easily accessible and searchable – Google just received a patent this month for “a voice interface for search engines.” Patent number 7,027,987, which you can read in its entirety here, hit the SEO community like a storm. You’d almost think it came out of nowhere, especially with how tight-lipped Google has been about it. But these things always have some background, which I’ll show you in a bit.
First, let’s take a look at the patent. The co-inventors credited include Monica Henzinger, Alexander Franz, Brian Milch, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Those names are worth remembering, particularly Franz and Milch.
The patent goes on to describe the interface as “A system [that] provides search results from a voice search query. The system receives a voice search query from a user, derives one or more recognition hypotheses, each being associated with a weight, from the voice search query, and constructs a weighted Boolean query using the recognition hypotheses. The system then provides the results of the search system to a user.” One analyst translated this as “the system listens to your query, does its magic, and returns the results.”
It’s a bit more complicated than that, as the paper Franz and Milch wrote back in 2002 makes clear. Titled “Searching the Web by Voice,” the five-page document (available here: http://labs.google.com/papers/webbyvoice.html) explains the hurdles faced by trying to create an accurate voice search interface. While some of the math was beyond me, one point stood out: after they had optimized it to the best of their abilities, the interface (to quote from the article) “can return the correct transcription of a spoken query among its top 10 hypotheses about 60% of the time.” That’s not bad, but it’s not exactly good either, and it’s certainly not “magic.” Of course, this was also four years ago, and we know how much technology can change in that time.
Next: History >>
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