Google Voice for iPhone

Earlier this year we launched a Google Voice HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app.

With this native app, you’ll continue to have access to all the major Google Voice features on your iPhone, like:

  • Cheap rates for international calls
  • Free text messaging to U.S. numbers
  • Voicemail transcription
  • Display your Google Voice number as caller ID when making calls

In addition to these benefits, the app provides some features that make using Google Voice on your iPhone a much better experience:

  • With push notifications, the app will alert you instantly when you receive a new voicemail or text message
  • Most of your calls will be placed via Direct Access Numbers, making them connect just as quickly as regular phone calls

Google Voice for iPhone is available to download from the Apple App Store today. You’ll need an iPhone with iOS 3.1 or later and a valid Google Voice account to use the app. At this time, Google Voice is available in the U.S. only.

Check out Google’s latest cloud technologies at Cloudstock!

There’s an exciting new event happening December 6th dubbed the “Woodstock for Cloud Developers.” We’ll be participating at Cloudstock, an industry event taking place in San Francisco’s Moscone West, that brings together a growing developer community and some of the leading cloud technology companies (such as Google, vmware, Salesforce.com and Amazon) to learn, hack and network.

Google is a strong believer in the open technologies powering the web, such as HTML5. Cloud computing is about powering innovations on the web with platforms and services that make developers like you more efficient and allow you to concentrate on solving business problems. No longer do you have to worry about the hassle of acquiring and managing servers, disks, RAM and CPU– it’s all accessible in the cloud.

Google will be presenting the following sessions at Cloudstock:

  • Introduction to Google’s Cloud Platform Technologies (Christian Schalk)
    This talk will provide an in depth review of Google’s Cloud Platform Technologies by first reviewing both Google App Engine and App Engine for Business followed by an introduction to Google’s new cloud technologies: Google Storage, Google Prediction API and BigQuery. Throughout the presentation, in depth technical demonstrations will be given showing how to use these technologies together in an integrated manner.
  • Selling your Cloud App on the Google Apps Marketplace (Ryan Boyd)
    This demo-focused session will review how to integrate your app with Google Apps and sell it on the Google Apps Marketplace to reach 30 million users at 3 million businesses. It will dive into the SaaSy Voice demo application, showing how technologies like OpenID-enabled Single Sign-On, OAuth and AtomPub make it easy to create great user experiences for your customers.

We have another session which will be announced shortly– stay tuned to this blog and the GoogleCode twitter account!

Register for the free Cloudstock event at:
http://www.cloudstockevent.com/

Moscone West
San Francisco, CA
Monday, December 6th, 2010

Looking forward to meeting you there!

By Ryan Boyd, Google Developer Team

Voice Search in underrepresented languages

Welkom*!

Today we’re introducing Voice Search support for Zulu and Afrikaans, as well as South African-accented English. The addition of Zulu in particular represents our first effort in building Voice Search for underrepresented languages. We define underrepresented languages as those which, while spoken by millions, have little presence in electronic and physical media, e.g., webpages, newspapers and magazines.

We believe that the speech research community needs to start working on many of these underrepresented languages to advance progress and build speech recognition, translation and other Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. The development of NLP technologies in these languages is critical for enabling information access for everybody. Indeed, these technologies have the potential to break language barriers.

Check out the Google Research Blog for more details.

Salani kahle!**

* “Welcome” in Afrikaans
** “Stay well” in Zulu

Posted by Pedro J. Moreno, Staff Research Scientist and Johan Schalkwyk, Senior Staff Engineer