Voice Actions For Android

Voice Actions is an enhancement to Android’s speech recognition capabilities. Previously, speech recognition was limited to entering text in any input box of any app and entering search terms in Google Search, Maps, and Navigation. Today’s update to Google Voice Search adds the capability to use voice to operate the phone by using what Google is calling voice actions.

Google has added nine voice actions to Voice Search. For example, to call someone in your contacts list you say “call [contact name] [phone type].” You can use voice commands to send text messages, get directions, send e-mail, view a map, open a web site, write a note to yourself, or listen to music. One limitation is that the listen to music action does not work with Android’s Music app nor doubleTwist, but it works with third party programs like Pandora and mSpot. The following video provided by Google provides more explanation of how Voice Actions works:

To use the voice actions, you start Voice Search by either tapping the Google Search widget or holding down the search button until the Voice Search prompt displays. To use voice actions you will need to download and install updates to Voice Search and the Search widget from the Android Market, and you will find the QR codes for both on Google’s blog entry announcing Voice Actions.

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