Our mission is our statement
|
|
|
Google showcases the future of search
SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE is at this year's Mobile World Congress demoing some of its features that will be coming to mobile users.
Although no major announcements were made, in a keynote headed by CEO Eric Schmidt, the company showed off some of the 'magic' that makes the mobile phone such a revolutionary device.
According to Schmidt, there are now 60,000 Android devices shipping per day, but he stressed that all mobile operating systems need to be open.
Schmidt also discussed how the limited resources of a mobile phone combined with its inherent Internet connection, have driven a cloud based computing model. He gave the example of voice recognition, which is very limited and cumbersome trying to be done locally on a mobile phone, but can be done quickly and accurately if handled in the cloud.
As this technology evolves, Schmidt foresees real time in-call voice translation and possibly even medical diagnosis based on the sound of your cough which, although a long way off, highlights the types of services previously relegated to the realms of science fiction.
In this regard, there was a demo of the expansion of search by voice, which is already available in English, Mandarin and Japanese, but is now available in German as well, even when heavily accented.
Building on the Google Goggles image search engine, the company also showed how this could be combined with optical character recognition to provide instant text translation from a photo.
Also demoed was full Flash on Android in the browser, so not just embedded video, but games and other more interactive applications as well.
While no major announcements were made, Schmidt and his colleagues did a good job of highlighting how far the mobile industry has come in a very short time and how the mobile phone has become "an extension of our self." µ
Tags: Google
Share this:
Share
Wow, ask and you shall get it... Thanks!
It already exists:
http://www.midomi.com/
except you have to sing or hum the tune
You'll probably never be able to whistle a tune and get an accurate match consistently, but if you can record the actual audio, mobile software for identifying music has been around for a few years.
This may sound dumb, but one thing along these lines that I've wished for for a while now is a tune search... ie, you have that tune stuck in your head, but no idea what it is. If you can do voice recognition, could you do tune recognition, ie, whistle the melody into your phone, and get a list of potential matches from Last.FM or something?
I personally am annoyed whenever people stick a new, trendy name to old-hat ideas. Your phone is too slow do do some things on it's own, so you have your phone act as a lightweight workstation while a server/servers handle the heavy lifting. But now we call it 'cloud computing'.
The 'real' reason why they call it cloud computing: because most people don't really know what it means, but it has a neat name and allows people to imagine that it's something really cool. Sort of like when you catch a quick glimpse of a cute girl but don't get a good look, and then you look at her more closely and realize she's a dog.