Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Google Gets Voice-Based Search Patent

I am still undecided on how big mobile voice search will be, but if it is, Google has a patent for ONE component of it now.

Google has Voice Search in their Labs department but it never worked when I tried it.


Google gets location based advertising and now speech intellectual property, hey Microsoft you still have a chance at beating Google, this is how.

From Real Tech News Google wins patent on voice-based search

Patent number 7,027,987 covers "A voice interface for a search engine". Filed Feb 7, 2001 and received April 11,2006.

A system provides search results from a voice search query. 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 system then provides the weighted boolean query to a search system and provides the results of the search system to a user.

The conflict I see is determining if the user is searching or trying to connect directly with a word(s).
Does this cover search going through an open network, or within a specific database (closed network)?
Does this cover ALL mobile speech recognition applications?

Here's a biggie. Does it cover trademarks? Will Google learn their lesson from Geico? There are a few other potential conflicts I see.

What if there is a speech recognition mobile search engine that identifies individual word(s). I say "Google" and it takes me to www.google.com. It's not searching, it's connecting. What if I say a word that isn't in the database and it goes into a default search mode?

I wonder how the courts will define the difference of a voice search query and voice information/connect function.

This will be interesting to watch.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At its base, voice search of course depends on the reliability of speech recognition.

And it's well understood that speech recognition, to the extent it works, does so mainly by restricting the grammar.

But how can search be made to work, so constrained?

Color me sceptical.