A patent application was published today which describes the kind of intelligent automated assistant that we see in use on Apple’s iPhone 4S, known as Siri. But the patent isn’t necessarily limited to the iPhone application itself, and the describes how such a system could be used in a number of ways, including with mobile phones, PDAs, tablets, game consoles, embedded computer systems in cars, and possibly others. This assistant might provide information and services on a single client device or multiple devices, and possibly in combination with applications and information on servers as well.
It could also act as an active participant in messaging platforms such as email, instant messaging, discussion forums, group chat sessions, and customer support sessions.
Apple’s latest phone has a slick voice control feature named Siri that lets you tell your phone to do a number of different things, and can even power searches that it will answer for you. There’s been some speculation that type of verbal interaction might harm Google because it would bypass the search advertisements that are Google’s primary way of earning money. Looks like Google isn’t taking that possibility lightly.
Will the future of searching involve speech based searches that we do on our phones, with results shown on our TV? A Google patent application describes the possibility.
Imagine being able to subscribe to a service where public service agencies, advertisers, and friends may be able to leave you mobile messages when you drive through or arrive at a specific location.
Google acquired a series of related patents earlier this month that cover this kind of location-based service, originally filed by a Fairfax Virginia based company, Xybernaut Corporation.
A screenshot from one of the patents shows this system implemented as a navigational device, but the patent is written in a way that enables a system like this to be used by many different types of handheld devices as well. It’s possible that Google Maps Navigation could use this system, though it could also be built into other parts of a mobile phone system as well. And it has a potential social element to it as well.
The earliest of the patents was filed in December of 2000:
Use your smartphone camera to take a picture of text in a newspaper, a magazine article, or a book, and if it’s available online you can access it electronically. Take an image of a print advertisement and you may be able to visit an online transaction page to make a secure transaction.
Snap a shot of a phone number and click on it to make the call. Capture an address and you can pull up a map showing you were that address is located. In addition to Web documents, you can use Exbiblio to access your own documents on your computer.
Looking through the USPTO assignment database, I noticed that Google had been assigned a majority of the pending and granted patents assigned to Exbiblio this past February. The video below describes some of the features and functionality that Exbibilio’s technology offers, and notes that their intellectual property is available for licensing.
Google Goggles lets you search by taking a picture of landmarks, books, business cards, artwork, product labels, logos, and text. It can use Optical Character Recognition to transform text in an image to searchable text on the Web, reads barcodes, finds similar images in databases of artwork and landmarks and other databases. But, we’re only seeing the surface of the capabilities that a phone based visual search can offer with Google Goggles.
A Google patent application published this week shows us what Google’s visual Search for phones might evolve into. When you take a picture of a city street, your picture may include buildings, street signs, people’s faces, cars, and many other objects. If you send that picture as a query, the search engine might break the image into parts and search for many of the objects in the image, and give you a mix of search results based upon all of those parts.
Back on August 9, the Google Public Policy Blog announced A joint policy proposal for an open Internet, co-authored by Google’s Alan Davidson, and Verizon Executive VP Tom Tauke. It was a little surprising seeing Google and Verizon join together to compromise about Net Neutrality.
The proposal from the two companies set two different sets of rules when it comes to broadband access and mobile access to the Web.
Earlier today, The FCC adopted a set of regulations regarding Net Neutrality, and the policy proposal from Google and Verizon seems to have played a part in how the new regulations will work. The regulation of Net Neutrality is a topic worth expanding upon, but I was more curious at this point about the relationship between Google and Verizon.
I’m not sure what role the following might have played in Google’s stance on Net Neutrality, but I found it pretty interesting. Yesterday, I wrote about how Google had acquired a number of phone related patents from Myriad Group. On November 8, 2010, the US Patent and Trademark office recorded the assignment of 84 granted and pending patent applications from Verizon Patent and Licensing Inc, to Google.
While Google started with a focus upon search on desktop computers, one of the areas where they seem to be growing quickly involves mobile technology. The future of search, of internet marketing, and SEO is increasingly moving towards mobile search and services as more people connect to the internet with handheld devices.
We see Google acquiring new companies and technology enabling phones to be used as electronic wallets, improving their capability to deliver secure digital content, including video, on a wide range of devices, including smartphones, and working on becoming more accurate in pinpointing where a user of their services might be for location-based services.
Google’s last quarterly financial statement noted that Google has made more than 40 acquisitions of companies in the past year, and a number of those involve mobile technology. One company that you won’t see on a list of acquistions by Google is Purple Labs, which until a year or so ago was busy developing (or acquiring) technology related to linux based software for mobile phones. But you may see their influence felt at Google.
In March of 2009, the shareholders of Esmertec AG agreed to the acquisition of Purple Labs, and approved a name change of the merged companies to Myriad Group AG. The CEO of Purple Labs, Simon Wilkinson was named the CEO of the new company. We’re told in the Myriad Group press release:
Last week, Google published a paper on a way of navigating on touch screens by tracing out alphanumeric characters. For instance, if you have a list of contacts on your screen, and want to move down to a name that begins with the letter L, you would trace an L on your screen. Looking for a song on your playlist, you might handwrite on your screen the first couple of letters from the song title.
The paper is Gesture Search: A Tool for Fast Mobile Data Access (pdf), and it tells us that Gesture Search is presently in use by hundreds of thousands of users, with a mean rating of 4.5 out of 5 for more than 5,000 ratings.
A Google patent application published October 14th, Glyph Entry on Computing Device, provides a number of details that the paper doesn’t, including a look at how this gesture navigation system might be used to navigate maps from Google Maps.
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