Google announced on Tuesday a new iPhone application that allows you to make location based searches just by speaking a question into your iPhone. Your spoken question, “Where is the nearest Best Buy?” for example, is sent to Google’s server as a digital file and processed by Google’s server side voice recognition software. The converted query is then forwarded to Google’s search engine and the results are sent back to the handset, supposedly within seconds. Excellent! This is no...

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Naturally Speaking, is developing a new mobile product called Open Voice Search. Similar to Vlingo and Microsoft’s TellMe, Open Voice Search allows users to interact with their phone through voice commands. This isn’t the archaic “Say a Command” voice commands that we know and love. In one application of the technology, Open Voice Search allows users to search the Internet by speaking into their phone. The Open Voice Search program transmits the spoken...