A really cool iPhone app is coming out soon. Voice search. Tired of typing searches into your tiny phone keyboard? Soon we will be able to just say what we are looking for and google will come back with results. Probably won't be perfect on day 1 but this is a huge leap forward in technology that is available to us on a daily basis. Even if it takes one more year to get it tuned and working well, who cares. We are willing to wait!

Here are some excerpts from an article in the New York Times:

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearestStarbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

...

The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions.

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As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.

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An intriguing part of the overall design of the service was contributed by a Google researcher in London, who found a way to use the iPhone accelerometer — the device that senses how the phone is held — to set the software to “listen” mode when the phone is raised to the user’s ear.

Google researchers said that another of its advantages over competitors was the billions of queries its users have made over the years.

The full article can be seen here on the New York Times website .