Google iPhone App: New? Shocking? Jingoistic?
From the “we’re all friends at the end of the day” file: Google Inc. this week introduced a free voice-enabled search application for the Apple iPhone that allows users to speak Google search terms into the phone rather than typing them. The move has set blogs a-twitter with What it Means.
Some have breathlessly considered this turn of events odd given Apple and Google’s sort-of competitive situations (the G1 vs. the iPhone), though Google is a highly public fan of Apple and vice versa. Others have heralded the application as groundbreaking functionality. But that idea breaks down because voice-enabled mobile search is not new: Microsoft has enabled that in Windows Mobile for over a year, and Yahoo!’s mobile app contains it as well.
You could say it’s important because it voice-enables no less a cultural entity than Google, and so a lot more people (well, iPhone users) will be using it than ever before. That certainly holds water. The sheer ease-of-use aspect to it is almost irresistible. Who wouldn’t want that? Well … the British, that’s who.
Because the factor that is perhaps the most interesting in this launch is this: The application is as American as apple pie. It gets confused if you throw a foreign accent at it.
British newspaper the Telegraph found it pretty difficult to get the results one would want after testing a range of regional U.K. accents against the application, to put it mildly. When “iPhone” was spoken into the interface, some of the priceless results included:
Surrey and Kent accents: “Einstein,” “MySpace,” “my sister”
Yorkshire: “bonfire”
Scottish: “sledding,” “sex”
Welsh: “gorillas,” “kitchen sink”
So, is the application jingoistic? Nah. Just gives people an excuse to practice their American accent.
