While Android is rightly causing angst among its competitors as it continues to make headway in the smartphone OS market, little has been revealed about the 25 per cent of search traffic on the Android platform that comes via voice.
The company has admitted that it plans to develop the Voice Actions across the Android platform to enable users to construct emails and find music via speech recognition.
The company believes new capabilities like Voice Actions will keep it ahead of the game. Android product manager, Hugo Barra, said, "Before it was easy to search the web using voice but people do a lot more than just search the web. Now you can voice up text messages, e-mail a reminder to yourself, set your alarm clock, get directions, find music, open a map and call places."
Barra added that Voice Actions "represented the most significant progress Google has made in speech recognition ever since we launched voice search about two years ago. It really is about interacting with the device in the simplest of ways using the voice."
The company said that the Voice Actions application was compatible with handsets that run the Android 2.2 operating system, codenamed Froyo. Currently only available in English, the application is in-built into the forthcoming Droid 2.
Early versions of Voice Action automatically censored curses and other offensive words on the Nexus One phone. The latest release now lets users turn off the auto-censorship feature.
For more on this story:
- read BBC News
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