Google Voice Search

Google look to voice search

Search engine giant, Google, has prompted speculation about the future of voice-based search following its acquisition of patent 7,027,987, Voice interface for a search engine. While Google has not offered an official comment on the technology yet, the patent's abstract on the US Patent Office database indicates that voice recognition technology would be utilised to perform a search query in much the same way as the text based service works at the moment. The abstract describes how: 'The system receives a voice search query from a user, derives one or more recognition hypotheses, each being associated with a weight, from the voice search query, and constructs a weighted boolean query using the recognition hypotheses.' The Boolean search allows users to create a refined search by constructing logical relationships between terms to widen or delimit the results, typical Boolean terms are or, and or not.