Google adds Google Now like voice recognition to iOS search app

Over the past few months Google has been hard at work to reinvent its already class leading search engine. In May, it announced Knowledge Graph and in late June it revamped the core search experience in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and also launched a personal assistant of sorts called Google Now. Today Google has announced it is not only further bolstering the capabilities of the Google Search engine, but also it will soon bring the Android like natural speech recognition capabilities to iOS.
The biggest announcement out here is the addition of Voice search to the iOS Google search app. Google’s Voice Search can interpret natural language and it also responds back, just like Siri. According to early reviews of this feature on Android 4.1, the consensus suggests that Google’s implementation of Voice Search is not only remarkably faster than Siri on the iPhone, but also more accurate. Google says that iOS users will get access to this feature soon, but it has not stated whether Apple has approved the app.

The next big announcement is that Google is activating Knowledge Graph for all English speaking countries. At the time of writing this article, it is not yet active in India, but we have seen Google perform some shadow tests a couple of weeks ago, so it should not be far away. The Knowledge Graph taps into database of more than 500 million people, places and things with 3.5 billion attributes and connections between them. This means Google tries to understand what the user is actually looking for rather than ask for a generic search query, a preview of which is provided on the right-most column. Another enhancement made to search experience is the ability to search within from one’s Gmail. Google has opened a limited trial where users can sign-up to get information from Gmail directly from the Google search box.