Google extends voice search to PCs

Google has extended voice search available so far on Android phones, to personal computers. Google announced the new feature last week at its search event in San Francisco.

With the voice search option, users can speak their search requests in English while sitting in front of their office and home computers, instead of manually typing it out.
 
According to analysts, with such features aimed at simplification of search results, Google hopes to extend its dominance in the internet's most lucrative market so far: steering people to the information they want as quickly as possible. With more search requests, Google gets more opportunities to display ads that generate most of its revenue.

Currently, the spoken-request option for desktop computers is available only on Google's Chrome browser and it can be activated by clicking on a microphone icon inside Google's search box on Google.com. However, Google's India website Google.co.in does not offer this feature.

The internet search company hopes to eventually make all the features available on Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox browsers, both of which have wider audiences than Chrome. The feature will, over time, be developed to allow requests in other languages, too.

The speech-recognition technology is built around a database of more than 230 billion words. These words have been taken from processing spoken requests over phones in the past two and a half years.

However, according to analysts, all of those words won't necessarily translate to accurate searches as a lot depends on the manner in which Google's algorithms handle the words when they're paired or strung together with other words. In their tests, eweek.com researchers have found that Voice Search was able to accurately process 6 out of 10 of its variegated search queries.