Google Granted Voice Search Patent - History
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Speaking of time, I’d like to give you a little more of a historical timeline as background about Google and voice search. You’ll see, as I said earlier, that this patent didn’t come out of nowhere.
We can start with speech-to-text tools. Those have been around for decades. Of course they weren’t very good at the beginning, because of accents and subtleties in speech. Even today, using modern speech-to-text software, the program and the speaker end up training each other to some degree.
Moving further forward in time, IBM was talking about voice-in, text-out as early as 1999. Big Blue saw it as a way to get around the problems of decreasing cell phone size. Of course, well before that you had the 411 service evolving into a computer-driven voice-in, voice-out service that used human operators only as a back-up if the machine couldn’t decipher the query.
Google filed for its patent in 2001. At a guess, Franz and Milch were already working on their paper at the time, or at least finishing up the research. Interestingly enough, V-ENABLE, a company not affiliated with Google, was founded in the same year. On its home page the company bills itself as “the leading provider of mobile speech search solutions…” Craig Hagopian, president and COO of the firm, recently noted that Google’s patent appears to be complementary to his company’s technology – and turned coy about whether and what kind of discussions he was having with Google.
But now let’s continue with the timeline. Google regularly puts potential products up on the Internet in the Google Labs section of its website. These not-quite-ready-for-prime-time items sometimes go up with no fanfare at all; they’re just there for users to discover. So it was with Google Voice. As near as I can tell, this service went up sometime in 2003; you can still see it here (http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html). Late in 2003 the service was deactivated. It worked by having a user call an automated phone number, stating their query, then clicking on a link on the demo page to see their search results.
How good was it? One person commented to a blog discussing the patent that “I used the service back in fall 2003 I believe. It was pretty amazing – it understood what I said, and the results were instant on my screen. I caught it right at the end of the demo phase, I think. I tried to show my co-workers a couple days later and it was already down, and it’s been down since then…”
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