Over the years, our Google India engineers have worked hard to develop products to fit the unique needs of Indian users. One good example of this is Google Phone Search, which started as an India labs experiment in 2008, to offer users in India the ability to search for information on their phone by dialing into a toll free number.

This labs experiment helped us learn more about user needs and build core technologies like speech recognition, which are helping change how people search and perform other activities on the web. It also served as the starting point for our recently launched Google Mobile App, which enables users to search by voice, and is compatible with a variety of Indian accents.

Given the overlapping purposes of these products, we’ll be winding down Google Phone Search and encouraging Indian users to take advantage of Google Mobile App (GMA), which provides a far richer experience compared to the limited medium of phone call. GMA allows you to visually interact in addition to speech. So if you were a fan of Google Phone Search may be it’s time to say hello to GMA and give it a try.



Posted by Speech Team , Google India