Abstract
An important goal at Google is to make spoken access ubiquitously available. Achieving ubiquity requires two things: availability (i.e., built into every possible interaction where speech input or output can make sense) and performance (i.e., works so well that the modality adds no friction to the interaction).
This chapter is a case study of the development of Google Search by Voice – a step toward our long-term vision of ubiquitous access. While the integration of speech input into Google search is a significant step toward more ubiquitous access, it has posed many problems in terms of the performance of core speech technologies and the design of effective user interfaces. Work is ongoing and no doubt the problems are far from solved. Nonetheless, we have at the minimum achieved a level of performance showing that usage of voice search is growing rapidly, and that many users do indeed become repeat users.
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Schalkwyk, J. et al. (2010). “Your Word is my Command”: Google Search by Voice: A Case Study. In: Neustein, A. (eds) Advances in Speech Recognition. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5951-5_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5951-5_4
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