After an initial delays from Apple in commercializing the latest Google search feature for its smartphone device, the Apple App Store for the iPhone is now featuring an application that allows users to search the Web simply with vocal commands.

As reported on a ZDNET blog, Google had already announced the feature release last Friday, saying that it would push the application on iPhone's App Store, although this new and exciting feature, which interestingly comes for the iPhone even before being released for the Android platform, didn't hit the virtual store until just a few hours ago.

ZDNET blogger and programmer Garett Rogers speculates that the Mountain View, California-based company managed to release this feature also thanks to the data gathered with its 1-800-GOOG-411 free 411 phone service that was launched earlier last year, also underlining the release policy for Google's developer community to land new software on its competitor platform first, rather than on its own platform: a sensible reason for such an approach could be to have a wider spectrum of clients testing the software, since Apple's smartphone sales account have long surpassed the ten million mark with its market share at about one percent of the total mobile phone market.

According to an article recently published on the New York Times, Google's new application could represent a cornerstone in the decades-long artificial intelligence field of vocal recognition: the application would in fact allow users to, among other things, ask questions with the vocal recognition feature turned on to see it answered automatically by the system.

According to the NYT, the sound is then converted into a digital file, sent to Google servers and processed, sending back to the user the search results corresponding to the parsed search query, all in the course of just a few seconds. Such an architectural choice, chosen instead of simply demanding the decoding process to the iPhone application itself, was in all likelihood made to both preserve the phone battery and remedy to the relatively weak smartphone processor when compared to Google's servers.

Of course, the price to pay is a heavier network usage and a response time that strictly depends on the network speed: when

connected to a wireless network, the response time is of the order of a few seconds, but reduced connectivity is likely to slow down this feature considerably, possibly to make it nearly unusable.

Both competing search engines already offer voice recognition tools for mobile phones: Microsoft Tellme currently enables users to perform specialized searches, such as maps, directions and movies, while Yahoo's oneSearch, a more flexible solution, doesn't appear to parse sentences as accurately as the new Google product does.

According to a review appeared on CNET.com, in fact, the accuracy of this new feature is surprisingly high, being able to parse well simple one-word queries as well as rather long ones at the first try, without the need for the user to later correct the query by tapping on one of Google's search suggestions: this is a crucial feature, since most users are likely to use the voice recognition function only for longer queries to save time.

Another interesting feature of the software is that there is no need to press any button at all in order for the vocal recognition to work: if enabled, in fact, the software can automatically recognize when the user is taking his mouth close to the microphone to pronounce a new query. Of course, the only exception to this rule is when a headset is being used, in which case the user has to tap on a button on the screen to start recording.

Google representatives declined to provide accurate estimates for how often the service gets the query right at the first try, although reviews from established websites all over the Net have been rather positive so far, and the product is free to download for every iPhone user. Google spokesmen told the New York Times that, 800-GOOG-411 service aside, one of the main advantages Google had from the beginning when developing products like this was the greater number of search queries performed through its search engine.

Although quite accurate, the software is reportedly still very far from being close to 100, or even 95 percent accuracy, but still "gets the job done over half of the times, which makes it a useful feature", according to some reports recently appeared on the Net. But the biggest issue so far, as noted by TechCrunch, is the inability to perform searches witin the phone content, such as e-mails, messages and contact information stored on the device, which can be quite frustrating.