Google is allowing some users to search the web by voice on their desktop browsers, a spokesperson from the company confirmed to us today in an email. Selected users are shown a little grey microphone at the end of the search box. The experiment was first mentioned by San Francisco’s Matt Schlicht, social product lead at live streaming video service Ustream, and was written up by the blog Mashable. (Turns out Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable posted on this even earlier, this morning.)
Voice search may or may not come to the desktop browser version of Google beyond this experiment, but it would good for Google’s long term interests if it did. Would it be good for users? Do you want to use voice input for search when you have access to a full keyboard, as opposed to a little Android phone? I suspect for many people the size of a keyboard is a less limiting factor than comfort using it for input. Voice search on the desktop could change the nature of peoples’ search queries and provide a lot more speech data for Google to analyze and learn from.
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