Google, Can You Hear Me Now?

By Joshua Martin, Senior Analyst, Yankee Group

How many times will that tired phrase grace news and blog headlines this week? Well, at least once and I’d venture to say quite a bit more as people wake up to realize the much ballyhooed Google mobile application update with voice search has finally launched.

Diminishing the need to key in searches manually (those small letter can be a killer), Google mobile provides location aware results for places nearby (with phone numbers one touch away), relevant websites, google images, and youtube videos. With the advent of universal voice search* (and really, can speech to e-mail be that far behind) will those married to their Blackberry’s finally be convinced to forgo that QWERTY?

Some of the reticent may buy iPhones, but by and large what the application will do is further cement Google as the search application for ALL iPhone users, and when you make money from advertising this is a good thing. Why would a user choose any other search tool until they offer something equal to or better than what Google has launched? Add in the aforementioned potential of voice to Gmail conversion (I’m hoping!) and suddenly more nails are being hammered into Yahoo’s coffin. Speaking of which, sorry to see you go Jerry. Rarely do we have a CEO with superpowers - no one had the ability to diminish shareholder value faster than you!

With rumors that Apple could be developing its own application for search, this is a shot across the bow for Google. No one will beat them on search. Not even Apple. There is one other factor to consider. This application demonstrates the power of a third party application but it is not fully integrated. Now, imagine how powerful voice search would be if it was baked into the operating system. Now if only Google had their own mobile operating system….

Could voice search be one of the killer apps for Android? Could Google have made the application available on the iPhone to demonstrate how great Android will be if and when such technology is incorporated into its very core? Only time will tell if Google will use such an application to build momentum for Android phones but in the interim they will simply have to be satisfied with further dominating search.

* A quick note that voice cannot be used to search contacts. Again, this is something that could potentially be addressed with an update but a feature I fully expect to be available when Google released voice search on Android.

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