The search giant is always trying to put forward easier and user-friendly features to its search. The latest announcement in this direction comes with introduction of Google voice search for Nokia S60 phones, and with ability to understand Mandarin Chinese.
Google is constantly maturing its voice search by expanding its compatibility from English language to other world’s spoken languages.
The step was taken in direction considering the difficulty Nokia S60 (N95/E71) users having 12-digits keypad faces while type words.
Installing new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut widget on the Nokia phone’s home screen. This enables vocal search or written query directly from Application, avoiding delay required to launch web browser for search query.
Google results search related to your query depending upon your nearby location using GPS or your cell tower triangulation.
The new Mandarin speech recognition feature is right now only a part of Nokia S60 but Google said that they will soon add the support to their products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. Also the new application is only for version 3 of Nokia S60 and recent phones running version 5 (touch screen) yet not support the feature.
Google expressed in its blog post that this first version of Mandarin speech recognition required lot of efforts and although it may not be a perfect one but they will keep improving it with time. “To get Mandarin speech recognition to work, we had to learn a lot about this fascinating language — the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, its tonal characteristics, automatic segmentation of text into words, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets…the list goes on and on.”
To download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone’s browser.