I can’t wait to get the Google iPhone app that answers questions asked by voice:
Tim O’Reilly called this one a year and a half ago, I think, when he said that GOOG-411’s core purpose or fringe benefit was that Google would harvest our voice samples and out of them create the best voice recognition online. Now Google can answer any question we ask (we’ll see how well it works sometime today).
This is about mobile, of course. Eric Schmidt told Jim Cramer a few weeks ago that in the future, Google will make more from mobile than from the web because it is a better targeting opportunity and targeting — relevance — is Google’s real business. This is also about the next real operating system of the internet. Microsoft has its voice-recognition software, of course, but Word isn’t where this battle will be fought. The sidewalk is the place.