Is Google suddenly understanding more of what you’re saying to it? It’s not just you, the company has made some improvements to voice search.
Google’s voice search is running on a whole new engine that’s able to recognize and anticipate words with a higher rate of accuracy. In addition, it’s able to more accurately recognize speech in situations where there is a lot of background noise.
Google’s Speech team credits the advancements in voice search to the development of more effective neural network acoustic models:
“These models are a special extension of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are more accurate, especially in noisy environments, and they are blazingly fast!”
Right now, the enhancements to Google voice search can be seen in the Google Search apps for iPhone and Android. As of yet, Google’s new voice search engine is not yet integrated into mobile web browsers like Safari and Chrome, at least not on iPhone.
However, that doesn’t seem to be a problem for people, as the Google Search app was recently reported to be the 4th most popular app in the US.
In addition, comScore reports that the year over year growth of the Google Search app has surpassed Facebook. Another interesting point is that it’s featured on the home screens of nearly 30% of phones.
So if you haven’t searched via the Google app lately, give it a try and see how smooth voice search feels now.
Editorial Credit: Alexander Supertramp / Shutterstock.com
