Think of the times you’ve called a company and selected menu options using your voice. That’s an example of voice search and according to SpeechCycle ^[1] CTO Roberto Pieraccini writing for Mashable, the technology is something we’re all going to be hearing more about since many smartphones now offer it as a built-in feature.  

He explains how it works: when performing a voice search, speech is collected on the phone and streamed to a remote database running complex voice-recognition algorithms that return corresponding text to the user’s search box in seconds. Since this happens on the cloud and not on the device, a remote voice search recognizer can typically handle vocabularies in the millions of words, including proper names like those of people, restaurants and businesses, and do it in a blink.

Pieraccini says as much as 25 percent pf smart phone users are already performing voice search with that number expected to grow–not only for searching the web, but also for doing things like searching for a contact name or an address stored in the phone or adjusting phone functions. And because voice search is now becoming integrated with language-understanding technology, Peraccini says “We are going to see more and more applications that are integrated not only with the web, but also with our whole environment at home, at work or even at our favorite stores. Soon, users will be able to access anything from their phone with a quick and easy voice command.”

Read more at Mashable ^[2].