Search by Voice Comes to Google Maps 4.1 for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones

We understand that typing on phones isn’t as easy or fast as talking into them. As a result, we’re big fans of letting you search in Google Maps for mobile in the most natural way possible -- with your voice! Not wanting the BlackBerry and Android folks to have all the fun, today we’re happy to announce Search by voice in Google Maps 4.1 on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones.

Search by voice lets you easily search for anything by simply speaking your search terms instead of typing them. Just open Google Maps, press your phone’s “call” button, and clearly speak your search term like “Park Plaza.” Search by voice works with all the kinds of searches Google Maps for mobile already supports, including places, addresses (1600 Amphitheatre Parkway), specific businesses (The French Laundry), or types of businesses (sushi restaurants new york).

You may also notice a few other additions, including a redesigned settings page with Search by voice language choices. Choose your preferred language from the supported options, including multiple English accents and Mandarin Chinese. Also, if you find a problem with any information in Google Maps, you can use the “Report a problem” option to let us know.

To get started, install the latest version of Google Maps for mobile 4.1 for Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 by going to m.google.com/maps in your phone’s standard web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile). This update is available in all the countries and languages where Google Maps for mobile is currently available.

Visit our Help Center to learn more or tell us your feedback and questions in our Help Forum. Give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page.

Posted by Yuliang Wang and Yifei Zhang, Software Engineers, Google Mobile Team

​New YouTube App for Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 phones

Cross posted from the YouTube blog

​Last March, we launched the YouTube Mobile app for Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile phones. Since then, the application was translated to 12 languages, installed on millions of devices around the world, and has been chosen as a Nokia Ovi Top App of 2009. Today we’re excited to announce the release of the latest version of the YouTube Mobile app, version 2.4.

We strongly believe that faster is better. The YouTube Mobile app is designed to be the fastest way to find and play a video on your smartphone. In the initial release we minimized the number of features and focused on speed for things that matter - app startup, finding a video, and starting playback.

In today’s release we have added search query suggestions, ‘My Account’ support, and a new homescreen user interface that is optimized for larger screens. Now when you log into your YouTube account on our phone, you can view your favorites, subscriptions and playlists from wherever you are. Let’s say you have recently found an amazing basketball shot video and favorited it on your desktop PC. When you’re at the basketball court with your friends all you need to do is launch the YouTube app and go to your “Favorites” to show it to them.



Another feature that we have added is query suggestions. When you type into the YouTube search box, you get relevant suggestions. This saves on typing which is especially useful for mobile phones where text input may be difficult.


To download the app on your Windows Mobile or Nokia S60 phone, simply visit m.youtube.com/app in your phone's browser. For more information, please take a look at the YouTube Help Center.

​Posted by Andrey Doronichev, Product Manager, YouTube Mobile

Keep your starred items in sync with Google Maps

(cross-posted with Google LatLong Blog)

Google Maps for mobile has long allowed you to add stars on a map to mark your favorite places. You may have noticed a few months ago that Google Maps for desktop browsers introduced the ability to star places as well. Unfortunately, there was no way to keep these starred places in sync with Google Maps on your phone. With today's release of Google Maps for mobile 3.3 on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, you'll now be able to keep the starred places on your phone and on your computer completely synchronized. It's like magic, but magic that you can use. Let me show you how:

My colleague Andy is at his desk right now, and he wants to check out some comedy in London tonight. Google Maps lists the 4th result as Upstairs at the Ritzy -- it sounds like a great spot: cheap, fun and comfortable. With one click, Andy stars the item and he's done. When he walks out of the office and turns on Google Maps on his Nokia phone, Upstairs at the Ritzy will be the top place in his list of Starred Items, and it will show up as a star on his map. From there he can call the theater, get walking directions, or even SMS the address to a friend.

Starring on Google Maps for desktop computers and Google Maps for mobile

Starring places also works great when you're out on the town and you find cool spots using your phone. I was in Paris with my wife recently. We visited the obvious tourist spots like la tour Eiffel and le Musée du Louvre, but we also found a few interesting places we hadn't expected. While wandering the streets of Paris, we stumbled upon a cafe...the sort of place you'll remember forever, but immediately forget the name. I started Google Maps on my Nokia phone, searched for the name of the cafe (Les Philosophes) and starred it, knowing that when I come back to Google Maps on my computer at home, it will be starred, right there, on my map. How cool is it to create a trail of interesting places from your phone?!

For users upgrading from an older version of Google Maps for mobile, you'll be asked, when you log in, whether you'd like to synchronize your existing starred items with your Google Account. This means you can preserve all the work you've put into customizing your map on your mobile, and have it show up, conveniently, in Google Maps in your desktop browser.

To enjoy the benefits of all this mobile synchronization goodness, download Google Maps for mobile for your Symbian or Windows Mobile phone by visiting m.google.com/maps in your mobile browser. And don't worry, we're busy building this same functionality into our other mobile versions of Google Maps -- so sit tight.

Posted by Flavio Lerda and Andy McEwan, Software Engineers

Google Search by voice: Now in Times Square!

If you've been to Times Square in New York City over the past couple weeks, on any day from 12:30-2:00pm or 6:30-8:00pm, you may have noticed that Google Search by voice is powering Times Square's largest combined displays -- the Reuters Sign and the NASDAQ sign. Anyone can call 888-376-4336 and say the name of a business or a location that they want to search for, like "museum of modern art" or "pizza". Then, the query and local search results from Google will appear on one of the two electronic billboards. This is all part of Verizon's "Droid Does" campaign and has been developed in partnership with Reuters and R/GA, a digital advertising agency.

On Black Friday, Times Square's gigantic interactive search-by-voice demo will be running for 20 hours straight. So if you're in the area and have a chance to take a break from your shopping, or if you want to see your next shopping destination displayed on a Google map on the huge signs, give the demo a try and let us know what you think. And for those of you that aren't in Manhattan on that day, you can still watch the action via webcam.

I flew out to New York last week to try it myself. R/GA gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the setup, and I was impressed by how they pulled this off. A caller's voice is sent through the phone system, directly into a small farm of real Droids running voice search that are connected to the big outdoor electronic displays! R/GA developers made use of the Android voice recognition API just like any Android developer can.

It's been quite a ride for the search by voice team -- from launching on the iPhone about a year ago, to our launches on BlackBerry and Android, and on S60 in Mandarin Chinese, to powering billboards in Times Square. We're thankful for the chance to work on technology that excites us and that can help more of you search faster and more easily on your phone. And we hope you've been noticing the ongoing improvements in the accuracy of our voice recognition. We can't wait to show you what we have in store for next year.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Posted by Mike LeBeau, Senior Software Engineer

Google Search by voice travels the world, finds Nokia, learns Chinese

(cross-posted with Official Google Blog)

Google Search by voice has grown up quickly. Some might say that search by voice has matured from a toddler to a tween. It's certainly been traveling across the English-speaking world and getting better at understanding a range of accents, from the US, UK, India, and Australia. Today it's taking another big step — we're happy to announce that Google search by voice is available for Nokia S60 phones, and now understands Mandarin Chinese.

Nokia S60 phones are popular around the world. If you have an Nseries or Eseries phone such as the N95 or E71, you're using S60. Many of these phones have 12-digit keypads — good for making calls, but not so easy when you need to type a few words. Many of you have asked if we could build our search by voice feature for these phones, and we've been working on this feature for a while.

The new version of Google Mobile App places a shortcut to Google search on your Nokia phone's home screen, allowing you to search using your voice or by typing. You can search for anything — from "movie times", to "fish 'n chips", to "masala dosa." It doesn't matter if you're in London or Bangalore: we'll use your location to give you nearby results. And Google Mobile App shows search results in the application, so you don't have to wait for a web browser to launch to get an answer.

Although it has taken a little while to get this release ready, we have been planning the launch for some time as you can see from this footage from the archives.



Up until now voice search has only been available in English, but the new version of Google Mobile App for Nokia S60 devices works for Mandarin speakers, too. We're really proud of the work we've done with Mandarin speech recognition, both because it's the most spoken language in the world, and because of the engineering challenge. To get Mandarin speech recognition to work, we had to learn a lot about this fascinating language — the differences between traditional and simplified Chinese, its tonal characteristics, automatic segmentation of text into words, pinyin representations of Chinese characters, sandhi rules, the different accents and languages in China, unicode representations of Chinese character sets...the list goes on and on.

Mandarin speakers can now search by voice for complex queries like 清华大学附近的水煮鱼 (which translates to "water-boiled fish near Tsinghua University"). Although this only works on the Nokia S60 at the moment, we're working on adding support for Mandarin speech recognition to our products on other mobile platforms, such as Android and iPhone. And bear in mind that this is a first version of our system in Mandarin, and it might not be as polished as our English version. For example, if you have a strong southern Chinese accent, it might not work as well as for people with a Beijing accent. However, our system will improve over time, so please give it a try!


Google Mobile App in Mandarin Chinese

Note that the application is for version 3 of Nokia S60 - more recent phones running version 5 (touch screen) are not yet supported.

To download the new version of Google Mobile App on your Nokia S60 phone, visit m.google.com from your phone's browser. For questions and support, visit our Help Forum.

Posted by Elke Michlmayr, Software Engineer