iPhone voice search

I love the new iPhone voice search, released yesterday by Google on the iPhone App Store. While the quality seems a bit shaky (I’ve gotten better results in TellMe searches myself), what’s even more exciting to me is how it will change smartphone users’ behavior. As people get accustomed to performing horizontal search (“Thai restaurant Cupertino”) from their iPhones, they’ll also want to use voice driven search for more vertical apps. For example, a mobile interface to CRM could say “accounts in Cupertino” to provide a set of customers in a location or “address of John Smith” to get driving directions on the fly. With toolkits such as TellMe and Nuance (and the appropriate easy to use platform, such capabilities should be able to perform far better in restricted problem domains. The key will be making it easy for mobile developers to add such capabilities to their apps without becoming experts in some voice recognition SDK. One more example of how a “mobile interface to an enterprise application” can provide powerful capabilities that the backend application doesn’t yet have. Stay tuned…