Sharad Nanda from Pune is a kebab (meat dish) fan. On a trip to Delhi, he wanted to savour some kebabs.
He could have easily phoned his friends for the exact location of eateries. Instead, he took out his cellphone, dialed a toll-free number and asked for kebab joints in a specified location.
In less than a minute, he was given a choice of three places.
He has much to thank the 'voice search,' which internet search giant Google recently introduced in Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
"This is in line with our mission of making information universally useful and accessible, be it at home or on the go," explains Hugo Barra, group product manager, Google Mobile. Not all those who make queries, though, will get accurate results, since the project is in its 'pilot stage.'
The 'voice search' uses a combination of automated voice recognition engine and operators to provide this facility. To make the service faster and better, Google is also experimenting with voice recognition technology, which will ensure 24-hour support. Currently, the automated system offers results in English, but the operator-driven system offers results in only Hindi and Telugu.
Google's logic is simple. Mobiles outnumber personal computers in India. Besides, just about 5-7 per cent of the population has an internet connection (this includes those who surf the net on their mobiles). "Voice enables India to reach non-web users in local languages even as our core strength is search," Barra adds.
In the US, Western Europe and Japan, the 'voice search' feature is available under the Google Mobile App for the iPhone. It is also available on the Android-based T-Mobile G1, and last month it was introduced on the BlackBerry as a free download. Simply speaking the word 'weather' into the phone, for instance, would throw up the top results.
In India, though, Google plans to extend the technology to other cities once it is confident in the quality of its speech recognition technology 'in any region of the country,' since the number of languages and accents in India are very diverse and distinct from each other.
Google is not making any revenue on this service in India (it monetises this in the US, Western Europe and Japan through ads which appear when the results show up). It does not charge the user for information received or for connecting them to businesses. The local business information used by Google is the same as that on local search. Data is continuously being added, and Google is collecting feedback from the users, Barra explained.
Google is very serious about its mobile strategy, Vinay Goel, country head of products, Google India, says: "There has been a significant increase of mobile search users in 2009." The search giant has also made Orkut (its social networking site) and Google Maps available on mobiles. Besides, it also has the Google Latitude (to help locate one's friends) feature as an opt-in download.
Goel concludes: "We believe that users graduate from plain voice search to an SMS-based one and finally to internet-based search, which is our goal."
May a thousand SMS publishers bloom
Google launched an SMS-based search too which can give users information on various topics including local business listing, the status of flight and train (PNR) bookings, stock quotes and horoscopes.
Moreover, it launched SMS Channels -- a free SMS messaging service for India only -- last October. The feature allows anyone to set up a group of mobile subscribers (friends, relatives, interested readers, etc.) to message to, or for a group to message each other. Currently, there are thousands of such channels, claims Goel.
A farmer, for instance, could subscribe to an SMS channel which gives him crop prices.
GupShup, Zook, and MyToday, have similar offerings. However, Google's SMS channel is two-way allowing for SMS discussions and also enabling subscribers to publish to the channel. "This is pure user generated content. We do not manage the content," asserts Barra. The service currently supports messages in several languages including English, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.