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Google Taking on Siri on Its Home Turf

By Oliver VanDervoort, Contributing Writer

One of the coolest and most sought after features of Apple’s (News - Alert) iPhone 4S was the voice activated digital assistant known as Siri. Since that program has been launched, there have been a ton of different companies trying to find a way to copycat the features (without looking like a copycat). Now that Siri is not a particularly brand new technology there are also plenty of users that are seeing a huge range of benefits when it comes to voice recognition software. Despite the different iterations of voice recognition software, few companies have taken Apple on the way Google (News - Alert) has with the release of a new Siri-like voice search option for iOS devices.

Instead of releasing an IVR program that only works with Android OS devices, Google has also come onto Apple’s turf by implementing the voice search upgrade on iOS devices like the iPhone (News - Alert) and the iPad. It seems likely that this move will, at the very least, impress people who own iOS devices (pre-iPhone 4S or iPad 3) that aren’t outfitted with Siri functionality. Google says that this particular iteration of their voice search.

When you open the Google Search app on your iOS device, you will be greeted with a message asking you to try the new voice search. You can then touch the microphone and speak into your iPad, iPod touch or iPhone much like people all over the country have seen users speak to Siri. As you speak, words will appear on the screen and the answer to your query will pop up relatively quickly. A Google blog post says that if the answer to your question is relatively simple and short it will actually answer you out loud.

Some accounts say that Google’s use of its Knowledge Graph makes the interaction better than Siri. The blog also showed a couple of different examples of how the app works. One instance had someone ask what “Yankee Stadium” looks like. Google’s Search App returned pictures of the stadium, while Siri gave the user directions to the stadium.

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