Google selects Korean as voice search language


	Mike Schuster, left, and Ted Cho answer questions via a remote broadcast from the U.S. on Google’s Korean voice input service. provided by the company

Google Korea announced the launch of a local voice input service yesterday that would make Korean the only language other than English used in the global service.

Google said it represented a significant upgrade of its popular voice search service, which was launched in Korea on June 16.

“The mobile traffic for Google’s mobile search jumped by 19 fold compared to that at the beginning of the year,” said Ted Cho, Google Korea’s engineering director.

Google said will improve voice recognition in conducting searches that can also be used for Gmail, Google Talk, SMS and Google Maps services.

The company said that Korean was selected as the second language because tests showed that it could be used with a high degree of accuracy.

A demonstration by Google Korea at a news conference yesterday at its headquarters in Yeoksam-dong, southern Seoul, showed the Korean-language service was close to perfect as it clearly displayed every word and sentence that was spoken into the device.

Although there were a few grammatical mistakes, such as spacing errors, the company said these problems would soon be resolved.

“Google is committed to improve the quality for end-users with regular updates as the Korean voice input is another step towards Google’s long-term goal to make speech an acceptable and useful input modality for any mobile device,” said Mike Schuster, head of voice recognition research at Google.

Google Korea said that its new voice input service will only be available on Google’s Android 2.2 or newer operating systems.

It added that it currently had no plans to support the service for the iPhone as it did not have client code access to Apple device keyboards.

Source:joongang daily

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