• Information Week, Monday, April 16, 2007 10:45 AM

Web researcher Stephen Arnold says he reads Google patents to predict the future. Right now, he's focused on United States Patent 7,027,987--a voice interface for a search engine. Arnold believes the patent reveals Google's plans to deploy voice search across a variety of media devices, from computers to cell phones, as well as for dictating voice-to-text on a word-processing program.

"There's no limit to how they can scale it," Arnold says. "They can embed the function on mobile phones, on browsers, on chips, and even on big mainframes. It's entirely device independent."

The research has "an important future," leveraging the tremendous processing power of the Googleplex to make the voice-search product more accurate. Because the company is putting so much muscle behind the technology, Arnold says other competitors will find it difficult to duplicate the company's voice search applications. "Google now has the machine -- its data centers -- to run voice. It will likely be a network-delivered service that can be used by any device with a microphone. You won't have to install anything." And it will likely integrate with any Google application, from Gmail, to Google Calendar or Google Docs.

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