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Google has spent so much time porting Web services functionality from its desktop to its mobile Android services, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the mobile team is giving something back: Google’s Voice Search service has been spotted in the wild on Google.com.
That’s right; the little microphone icon you see in the Google search widget and virtual keyboard on Android smartphones and as a feature of Google Search app for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia S60 phones is being bucket-tested on Google’s search engine.
Google Voice Search, of course, lets users input searches via voice instead of typing queries into their phone. After adding availability in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Latin American Spanish, Voice Search is available in more than two dozen languages and accents.
Matt Schlict, a product manager for Ustream, tipped Mashable after stumbling upon the tell-tale microphone icon. Google confirmed it, noting that it runs many search tests.
Schlict grabbed this screen:
Users will speak into their computers’ microphones to call up search results. Clearly, this application of voice search is more consumer use, or at least for those such as myself who work in a home office.
One imagines a funny scenario where a hundred people in cubicles for some company talk into their computer’s microphones to conjure results. Actually, it would make a funny cartoon in the high-brow New Yorker magazine.
In any event, I will welcome such a feature once it’s made available to me. I spend six hours or more typing stories each day; this feature will save me from typing searches.