How to impress your friends: 40+ voice searches on Jelly Bean

 

I never make videos, but felt compelled to share the many new voice capabilities on +Android, some of which were not demoed on stage during Google I/O 2012. You may be surprised by some answers, notably those provided by the Knowledge Graph.

This is not a performance or comparison test (I don't have an iPhone 4S or a Samsung Galaxy S3).

Also, sorry about the quality. My old Canon PowerShot does NOT do justice to the beautiful screen on the Galaxy Nexus.

Disclaimer: the only edits I made were to cut time between each of my queries, as well as re-order some of the demos from the original order I recorded them in, so they would fit into categories. None of the queries themselves have been edited or cut down, and the sequences are intact. The processing time happened exactly as you see. This demo is made on the early build of Android 4.1 (JRN84D, takju build for Galaxy Nexus I/O edition), on a wifi connection. Consider this beta.

A few observations:

1. Google will give you walking or driving directions directly, if you specify it. Asking for transit or biking directions does not work at the moment.

2. Google is able to distinguish how 'long' a bridge is in length vs. how 'long' a movie is in duration. That's assuming the data already exists in the KG.

3. Local search, coupled with auto-correct, is able to properly locate and spell 'Worcester Mass' and 'Wooster College', even though these places are in different states and can be pronounced the same way (or at least, I did).

4. The voice will speak back any answer it finds in the KG; however, Google currently requires that your query somewhat matches the way attributes are labeled in the Graph. For example, asking for the 'height requirement' of Space Mountain works, but asking 'how tall do I have to be for Space Mountain' does not work at the moment, because this particular data is labeled as 'height requirement'.

5. In order for answer cards to work properly, everything on your device (and the Google Now app) must be set to US English. More languages will be available soon.