How to: use Google Mobile to replace a dozen other applications

Published by Steve Litchfield at 18:21 UTC, December 14th 2009

It's all very well having huge screens, tens of thousands of applications and even virtual and physical qwerty keyboards, but there's plenty you can do without typing a single character using Google's humble new Mobile App, using voice recognition on a vanilla, cheap S60 3rd Edition phone. Here are a few ideas - you might be very surprised!

"The beauty of Google's voice-recognition-based Mobile App is that it partly frees you from physical restrictions on your smartphone. For the operations described below, you don't necessarily need a big screen or a qwerty keyboard - the smallest S60 phone with numeric keypad will do just fine. 

Having all this built into a single utility, itself tightly integrated into the biggest search engine and knowledge-base in the world, also means that you may not need to go hunting for 3rd party applications very urgently - some of the things listed below are available as third party 'Apps' on other smartphone platforms. Yet here you get access to the same information on any device, for free, and without typing a single character."

Read on


 

Filed: Home > News > How to: use Google Mobile to replace a dozen other applications

Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition, S60 5th Edition

Categories: Miscellaneous, Editorial Thoughts

News Discussion

Unregistered
if only you could use voice search in the google maps app for s60..
Captain Jon
I uninstalled this app after barely a day. Voice recognition is good for common words, but that's about it. Most of the time it was quicker for me to use my keypad to type than saying it out loud only for it to fail.

Apart from gmail, my mobile is mostly google free. I would like to keep it that way.
BtG
Utterly hopeless application. Deleted it immediately after it couldn't recognise anything I said (and no, I don't have any heavy accent whatsoever). It also creates an ugly icon on the homescreen and I don't like the bit in the T&Cs where it says they can do what the hell they want with your speech and location data and you will be contacted by 3rd parties. No thank you.
slitchfield
Interesting. I've found recognition to be pretty good. The trick is NOT to stop and clearly enunciate each word (as you'd expect) but to speak in normal flowing text.

Not too fast or with an accent, of course, but .... well, anyway, it's been working pretty impressively for me.
Williamoni
Thanks Steve - useful app.

I think Captain Jon is right about the voice recognition though. I found it to be fairly hit and miss. Try getting the app to recognise the word 'brown'. I gave up in the end. Coolness factor is therefore diminished. 'Hey guys look at this app translating the word 'brown' into French.' Eighteen attempts later and your friends are wondering why you didn't just type it in.

Overall, worth having I would say. Certainly 'weather' and 'taxi' worked for me, and also, vitally, cube root of five. :D
MIKO
funny, i ask time for my local location and it gave me UK time!

i ask for weather, it says 'service not available'...
jrmt
> auto-change the 'centigrade' to the more American 'celsius'

It's not more American (hint: they use Fahrenheit). It's just more correct. All that centigrade means is "divided into 100", so pretty much any metric unit is "centigrade". Celsius means it's specific to temperature. Of course, the average Joe doesn't understand the difference, but centigrade should be phased out as inaccurate.
neilhoskins
My own findings are pretty much like Steve's: I'm extremely impressed. Every time I start thinking that technology has nothing left to impress me with, something like this comes along and amazes me.
jamoiholland
I've found the app pretty good on recognition, maybe its an accent thing?! ;-)
Can you get this app (or indeed any other app for that matter) to auto-start in 3rd edition FP2?
Thanks, Jamoi

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