Google tips the scales in its own favor–but do marketers care?; Tuesday’s daily brief
Plus, how inclusion leads to diversity in marketing
Topic: Nuance Communications
Google developing keyboard for iPhone in hopes of boosting search volumes [report]
Keyboard part of a larger strategy to boost engagement with search on mobile devices.
Yahoo Gives $10 Million To Help Develop Next-Gen Siri And Better “Contextual Search”
Several years ago, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, as a then Google employee, spoke about the perfect search engine that could anticipate your needs and which wouldn’t require any keywords to deliver results. We’re rapidly moving toward searchless content discovery with Siri, Google Now, IBM’s Watson, Nuance’s Nina, Expect Labs and other “intelligent assistants.” Artificial intelligence-powered intelligent assistants […]
Analyst Gives Both Google Now And Siri A “C+”
Piper Jaffray financial analyst Gene Munster performed his now annual comparison of Google Voice Search/Google Now and Siri to determine which one performed better. Using 800 queries under a variety of “controlled” and “uncontrolled” conditions, Munster and his team tested and compared the two “assistants.” Munster gave Google Voice Search/Now a C+, an improvement from the […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 4, 2013
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Searching For The Voice Of Siri: Voiceover Actor Susan Bennett Says, “It’s Obviously Me” A story on CNN.com claims that Atlanta voiceover professional Susan Bennett is the original voice of Siri, […]
Searching For The Voice Of Siri: Voiceover Actor Susan Bennett Says, “It’s Obviously Me”
A story on CNN.com claims that Atlanta voiceover professional Susan Bennett is the original voice of Siri, Apple’s iPhone voice application. According to the story, Bennett did voice work for the software company ScanSoft in 2005. CNN says ScanSoft was then purchased by Nuance Communications, a company that is credited with providing Apple the technology […]
Apple Takes Siri Out Of Beta
9to5mac.com reports Apple has quietly taken the beta label off of their voice search feature, Siri. If you look at the iOS 7 Siri, the page makes no mention of beta anymore. The old iOS 6 version had the beta label on it, but iOS 7 Siri has removed that label. Here is the iOS […]
Samsung, Intel Invest In “Anticipatory Search” Startup Expect Labs
Expect Labs, which is a small startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, has a very impressive list of investors. Today the company announced a new funding round, though the figures weren’t disclosed. Investors are the venture or investment arms of Intel, Samsung and Telefonica. Telefonica is the world’s fourth largest telco and owns mobile […]
Grokr & Expect Labs: More Mobile Search Insurgents Appear
Just when you thought competition in search was effectively over, it starts to get interesting again. Over the past two weeks I’ve spoken to no less than four companies that say they are trying to reinvent “mobile search” for smartphones or tablets. I would almost guarantee there are more out there as well. These companies […]
KickVox Takes Aim At “10 Blue Links” With New Visual Mobile Search App
A few years ago VCs and entrepreneurs believed that there was an opportunity to disrupt online search, to offer a more compelling or next-generation experience. Companies like Powerset, which was sold to Microsoft, were among a class of search insurgents that spoke broadly about the opportunity to go beyond what Google was doing. That battle for the […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, August 6, 2012
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Getting Dev Team Mindshare For Your SEO Projects Getting in the development schedule in an enterprise environment can be one of the most challenging parts of the job for an SEO […]
Nuance’s Nina Is Siri For Enterprise Customer Service
Although there were so-called “virtual assistants” before Siri, consumers had only limited experience with them and may not have even realized what they were dealing with at the time. United Airlines’ “virtual agent” Alex is one such automated assistant, though it doesn’t use speech and currently doesn’t work on mobile devices. At least a dozen […]
Piper Jaffray “Street Test” Of Google vs. Siri Misses The Point
No sooner did I hit “publish” on my earlier post, Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice, than people on Twitter started responding that I was out of my mind. A couple of people cited a Piper Jaffray study, published yesterday, comparing the accuracy and breadth of Siri “search results” vs. […]
Google’s “Voice Assistant” Not Quite Siri-Smart But Most People Won’t Notice
At Google I/O this week Google introduced spoken search results, which mimic Siri’s functionality on the iPhone. Siri had been a major point of differentiation between Android handsets and the iPhone, despite Google’s preexisting voice search. The new Google female voice actually sounds less like a machine and more natural than Siri. And there are […]
Report: Siri Coming To iPad With iOS 6
With its latest iPad — “the new iPad” — Apple introduced voice dictation capability (via Nuance) but not its virtual assistant Siri. Now comes a report that Siri will soon come to the iPad with the iOS 6 update, which is also supposed to mark the debut of Apple Maps/iMaps. Next week is Apple’s WWDC […]
Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri
We’ve heard the search-related mantra “answers not links” so many times over the past few years that it sounds like a cliche. However in a mobile context the phrase has more meaning: a page of Google search results is ill-suited to the mobile use case. While Google has done many things to make it easier […]
Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
When you first begin using Siri it’s not entirely clear what you can do with it. (It’s also not clear how to access it.) Yesterday Danny wrote up some initial thoughts/criticisms of the Siri local search experience. In this piece I’m going to offer some general thoughts comparing Siri (on an iPhone 4S) with Google […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 6, 2011
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Marketing solutions at Search Engine Land Understand Your Web Visitors Without Using Cookies Multi-site Management: Challenges and Solutions Holistic Marketing: Fitting All the Pieces Together What’s the Secret to Video SEO? […]
Alternatives To Siri: Google Voice Actions, Nuance, Vlingo
Beyond some of the processing and other technical upgrades in the new iPhone 4S, the standout feature of the new device is the Siri “Assistant.” It’s an expanded and enhanced version of what’s behind the existing Siri iPhone app, which is being shut down on October 15. And while Siri is not a “voice search […]
Apple Delivers iPhone 4S With Siri Voice “Assistant,” Disappoints On iPhone 5
The Apple iPhone keynote just ended and as you probably already know there was no iPhone 5. What was announced was an interim iPhone 4S, which has a faster processor, iOS 5, improved camera/video camera and will work with both CDMA and GSM networks. So it’s a “world phone.” In the US it will reportedly […]
Apple Moving To Close Gap With Android On Speech, Navigation
As a long-time Android user I can tell you two specific areas where Android beats the iPhone’s otherwise superior user experience hands down: speech and navigation. All text fields on Android devices are speech-enabled, including email, SMS and the search box on any site. The iPhone offers “voice control commands” that allow users to initiate […]
Report: Apple Buys Mobile Search App Siri
Siri describes itself not as a “mobile search tool,” as I have in the headline, but rather as a “virtual personal assistant.” The company went public with its technology and iPhone app just a few months ago and now Apple has reportedly acquired it for an undisclosed sum that is likely more than $50 million […]
Siri: Not A “Search Engine” But You Might Use It Like One
When I’ve spoken in the past to people at Siri we’ve discussed and they’ve struggled a bit with how to present and “position” what they’re doing. Described as a “virtual personal assistant” — and called the “Siri Assistant” in fact in its formal launch — the company’s much anticipated iPhone app has arrived. There will […]
SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 12, 2009
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Microsoft Continues Peeling Off Yahoo Search Talent
Microsoft (so far) has been unable to buy Yahoo or Yahoo search assets, so it instead continues to take search talent away from the company. Last year Microsoft successfully lured engineering lead Qi Lu from Yahoo to become head of the company’s Online Services Group. Redmond also recently nabbed Sean Suchter from Yahoo. Now Bloomberg […]
Google Android Phone Finds Its Voice (Search That Is)
Google is rolling out voice search on the Android platform via the new software update happening this week. That’s also supposed to add a virtual keyboard apparently. The G1 has only a physical keyboard. CNET points out that the central difference between the iPhone version of voice search and Android’s is the inability to simply […]
Google Brings Voice Search To The iPhone
The New York Times reports in Friday’s newspaper that Google’s iPhone app will be updated with voice search capability. The move should come as no surprise: The launch of Goog411 in 2007 brought immediate speculation that mobile voice search was on the way, and Google tells the Times that data collection from the Goog411 project […]
Google Brings Voice Search To Maps On Blackberry Mobile Phones
Today Google announced a download that enables voice search for Google Maps on Blackberry devices. This is very much like the existing Windows Live Search for Mobile service with voice or Tellme for Blackberry devices (also Microsoft). Yahoo also recently integrated Vlingo’s speech technology into oneSearch.
Goog411 Voice Search And Speech Recognition
Tim O’Reilly has an interesting post that went up last Friday on Google’s potential motivation in rolling out Goog411. The obvious answer to the question “Why is Google doing this?” is mobile voice search and directory assistance ($13 billion in annual revenue per Opus Research). The conventional wisdom, which includes me here, holds that Google […]
Google Voice Local Search Launched
You’ve heard the rumors. Now you can try the experimental service from Google Labs. Google Voice Local Search is now live and publicly claimed by Google. Greg Sterling will be along to say more either here or in a fresh post. In the meantime, you can call (1-800-GOOG-411) and get local information by talking to […]