Many products are initially available in English, and then branch out into languages like French, Italian, German, and Spanish. (There’s even an acronym, FIGS.) But Google Search by voice broke with tradition – and started to make its way into a huge market – by moving straight from English to Mandarin Chinese today.
Mandarin Chinese is the world’s most-spoken language, with two different recent estimates putting the number of native speakers at around 845 million. If Google can win their loyalty with respect to voice search, it’ll open the door to all sorts of mobile revenue.
Of course, Mandarin Chinese is a famously complex language, and in a post on the Official Google Blog, Elke Michlmayr, a software engineer, acknowledged that Google Search by voice users shouldn’t expect perfect results just yet. Apparently southern Chinese accents may pose a problem.
Then here’s what may represent a much bigger catch: at this point, Mandarin speakers can only hope to have their words understood if they’re using the new version of Google Mobile App for the Nokia S60.
Still, Michlmayr stated that work’s being done to introduce Mandarin speech recognition to other devices (specifically, Android phones and iPhones), and its accuracy should improve over time.
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