If you are anywhere in Times Square  on Black Friday, perhaps after long hours of digging through those electronic stores in search of the best Black Friday deal, you might want to check Google’s latest search experiment – Google search by voice.
Nope you don’t need a web browser to do your search. All you need to do is call 888-376-4336 and say whatever it is that you want to search for and then look up ahead, particularly on large display screen that usually occupies the Reuters and NASDAQ sign. After Google’s local search algorithms do its work, local search results to your query will be displayed right on that giant display screen.
Cool, eh? Â Actually the gig is part of Verizon’s “Droid Does” campaign and developed with Reuters and a certain digital ad agency known as R/GA.
Google Search by voice in Times Square will run for 20 hours on Friday. And in case you’re wondering how this is being done, here’s the explanation on how the system works:
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.
So that explains why the gig is part of Verizon’s Droid campaign.
Originally posted on November 26, 2009 @ 4:53 pm