Natural Search Blog


Experiment with Google Voice Local Search

Google recently released their new Voice Local Search in beta, also known as “GOOG-411”, and I thought I’d kick the tires a bit. They also mentioned it on their new Google Lat Long Blog.

Google 411

I used to work for a major telco (Verizon), and we had a number of researchers working on various voice recognition systems. I’ve also tinkered a bit with applications using text-to-speech voice synthesis software such as the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech software, so I’m familiar with some of the issues that are commonly associated with these types of systems.

I was curious about whether Google’s clever engineers had perhaps improved upon some of the issues involved with having software recognize spoken words, and I also wondered how the quality was of their voice-synthesis.

(more…)

RSS Feeds
Categories
Archives
Other