14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s Voice Search application has just been updated with support for more languages. Currently available in 29 languages, Voice Search allows users to search the web and their phone by voice.
Moreover, Voice Search users can easily control their phones with Voice Actions. Calling contacts, getting directions and searching nearby locations will be much easier by simply speaking, instead of typing.
Fortunately, Google decided to expand the availability of the application to more users, which is why it added 13 more languages: Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, European Portuguese, Finnish, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak and Swedish.
According to Google, “each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges.”
However, given the fact that this application follows Google’s cloud-based model, the more people use it the more accurate it becomes.
Those who wish to take advantage of the features offered by this application should know that they can only speak one language onto the Voice Search app at a time.
In addition, users may need to change the language settings to use one of the 13 languages that have just been added with the latest update.
Google has also confirmed that this update is currently rolling out to Android devices and will continue to be pushed OTA (over the air) over the next week.
In order to get started with Google Voice Search tap the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on the home screen and speak the object you want to find.
Voice Search is now available as a free download via Google Play and it should be fully compatible with all devices running Android 2.2 Froyo and up.