Google's iPhone Voice Search App Stays Silent

Earlier we, and many others, showed a great deal of excitement over the new version of Google's search app for the iPhone. The new, voice-enhanced Google Mobile App was supposed to be updated Friday, according to the New York Times. But, uh, it never showed up.

Worse, Google removed its YouTube video regarding the new version, and no other statements have been made regarding it.

The new version of Google's iPhone app would take user speech, send it as a sound file to Google's servers, which would then perform speech recognition on it, and send the result back to the phone for the Google search. Nicely, the app even detects the phone being raised to your ear (via the accelerometer) to detect when to start recording. Of course, as I indicated, the server portion could produce some lag in the results.

But here we have a lag in posting the application.

But before anyone panics, I think everyone, including the NY Times, jumped the gun on this. The App Store approval process done by Apple is lengthy. Anyone notice how a new app will show up on the App Store but be dated weeks prior? It's because of the approval process.

Now, naturally I figured that if the NY Times was noting a launch today they would have checked where the app was in the approval process. Or perhaps it was Google jumping the gun.

At any rate, I don't think Apple would ban a Google app (unless, as they've done before, it duplicates something they have "in mind" themselves). I expect we'll see the app show up soon, particularly with all this publicity.

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