Google has recently announced that Voice Search is now available in Mandarin Chinese, albeit only for Nokia S60 phones at this point. If Google does things correctly, China’s huge population could stand to benefit from the instant convenience of Google Voice Search. No more need to type in search queries — just press and hold a button, recite your search query out loud, and Google fetches your results instantly.
Google Voice Search now recognizes several different English accents, although how many accents of Mandarin Chinese it recognizes remains unclear. While the technology is being refined, it will also be rolled out to iPhone and Android platforms in China. It’s likely that Google Voice Search will be made available to a much wider range of phone models in the future.
This is obviously good news for Chinese phone owners, who outnumber US subscribers two-to-one. If Google gets China right, then there’s no reason not to optimize Voice Search for other languages as well. Very exciting news — perhaps yet another step towards banishing the language barrier.
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