iPhone: Has Google lost its voice? (UPDATE)
For tech bloggers, this was bigger than Obama.
How else to explain the reaction Friday to John Markoff’s story in the New York Times about Google (GOOG) bringing voice activation to the iPhone, letting you search for everything from pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge to the length of a giant squid just by talking into your phone?
Markoff’s story was the No. 1 item all day on the Techmeme news aggregator, and by the time it was over more than three dozen tech writers had weighed in, from AppleInsider’s Katie Marsal to Eric Zeman’s Phone Scoop. Seth Weintraub posted a video. Several reporters spoke of it in the past tense, as if they had already had the program in hand.
So where is Google Voice Search?
According to Markoff, Apple (AAPL) was expected to make the free application — an update of Google Mobile App — available “as soon as Friday” on its App store.
Well, it’s Saturday morning, and as of this writing, the update is nowhere to be found. The bloggers are starting to go meta, writing stories like Harry McCracken’s “How Long Does Google Baby the iPhone?“
At this point, there’s nothing more to say — and besides, Google Mobile App isn’t listening.
Let’s go to the video.
UPDATE: Still no Google Voice Search, and now no video either. Sorry about that. When I ask my iPhone when voice search will be available, it just stares at me blankly.
UPDATE 2: Reader “severe” from Long Beach has located a copy of the original Google Voice Search demo. Let’s go to the new video.
UPDATE 3: Someone at Google “with knowledge of the situation” talked to Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington late Saturday night and told him they expect the new version of Google Mobile App to go live sometime Monday. In this version of events, Google did Apple a huge favor putting voice recognition on the iPhone first (rather than, say, Google’s Android platform) and for its pains was treated as shabbily as Apple treats the rest of its developers. See here.
MS Live Search on Windows Mobile has had voice search with GPS location of results for over a year now.
People don’t do research on an iphone. They do it on their desktop or notebook or UMPC. I found some voice recognition software named Tazti speech recognition that actually is a free download and performs voice searches of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, Amazon, eBay and many other websites. It also lets me log into and navigate Facebook and Myspace by talking to my PC. It really works well.
Here’s their youtube demo video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1tt_aeIAM8
RE: “… available “as soon as Friday” on its App store …”
“as soon as Friday” does NOT mean that it WILL be available Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, or even next week.
“as soon as” is an indefinite time period. The application can come ANYTIME from Friday or after.
Chill.
I believe the app is probably held back by Apple because of the review.
I think it’s pretty safe to say if it’s a Google App, it’s most likely still in Beta ;-)
There are several Youtube videos that were obviously made by Google, itself. So, this is obviously not just some rumor that someone made up. One of the Youtube videos goes from employee to employee, about 20 employees, throughout Google’s corporate office; so this is not just something that some blogger made up. This is for real. But where is it???
Can’t wait for this application. It will truly be groundbreaking for the iPhone, especially coming from Google.
If you’re interested, you can read about my experiences with many of the web and native apps I’ve used since my original iPhone and more recent iPhone 3G purchases on my blog at
http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com
Just click on the index for a complete listing. John
Google may have um… announced the app update before it had got approval for release from Apple and it’s thieving SDK agreement? If that is the case then this is a really arkward situation for Cupertino. Or maybe this is a stunt to show how much more open the app store for Android is?
“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available.”
Apparently Google jumped the gun with this. Or maybe they’re screwing the iPhone and just making the voice search for their own Android.
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Silicon Valley veterans like to joke that Steve Jobs must be surrounded by a reality distortion field; if you get too close to him, you start to believe what he's saying. Thanks to the success of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone and the renewed interest in the Mac, Apple has made believers out of millions of customers - and made a lot of investors rich. But Philip Elmer-DeWitt believes that an ounce of skepticism never hurts when writing about the company. He should know. He's been covering Apple - and watching Steve Jobs operate - since 1982, first for Time Magazine, then for Business 2.0, and now for Fortune.
Has anyone noticed that Apple have removed the “Free apps” section from the iTunes App store?
Now there is a “top free apps”, but that is it. If you want to find the other free apps, you have to hunt around pages and pages of Apps that cost money.
Now if you knew my phone bills, you’d know my point is not that it is hard to scam free apps. The point is that Apple are spending time making life hard for people to do what they want to do.
I will repeat that sentence, just in case the divine being ever reads this blog.
Apple are spending time making life hard for people to do what they want to do.
That is not only the precise opposite of what made Apple great, it is precisely the sort of corporate dishonesty that has made people loath microsoft.
I think Apple has huge, huge problems, in terms of leadership. They are creating a mega firm who feel they can dictate to the market, and they have begun to downgrade the efficacy of their products because their executives are so very clever, and know more than the market.
Apple are already hated by a lot of people. They are beginning to become hated by their development community. When that happens, I see viruses everywhere on the mac platform, and a sustained anti Apple campaign by people who know what they are talking about.
ex ped: Very interesting. Thanks. I see that in addition to the 10 top free apps displayed on the opening screen, the App Store will, if you click on the little gray arrow, display the 100 top free apps. (Same as they do with paid apps.) If you had your druthers, what would you have Apple do?