The animated logo for Google's Android operating system (Google)
SAN FRANCISCO – If you thought instant search wasn't quite fast enough, Google has the answer for you: no click searching.
The search giant on Tuesday unveiled a new feature that allows people to make Google search requests on many office and home computers without a keyboard -- a feature ported to the desktop from smartphones running on Google's Android software.
"We first offered speech recognition on mobile search, but you should have that power no matter where you are," explained Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, in a post to the official Google blog.
The spoken-request option will be available only on Google's Chrome browser. It will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon inside Google's search box. Chrome users will get the new feature within the next few days. Singhal said the feature has been remarkably successful on mobile devices.
"We’ve invested tremendous energy into improving the quality of our recognition technology—for example, today we teach our English Voice Search system using 230 billion words from real queries so that we can accurately recognize the phrases people are likely to say. As the quality has increased, so has usage: in the past year alone, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and every single day people speak more than two years worth of voice to our system," he wrote.
Google also unveiled a way to get results by dragging digital images into its search box.
The technological tricks are the latest Google innovations aimed at making it quicker and easier to search, unveiled at the company's InsideSearch 2011 event.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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