What was already a very useful app has now become even more useful. Google has updated Android’s voice search app to include support for regular phone tasks. Now, with just the touch of a microphone icon, you can tell your phone to call someone, text someone, email someone, play music, navigate you somewhere, write you a note, browse the web, and much more.

Where I find the most use out of this feature is in text messaging. Let’s face it, while driving; it’s pretty much impossible to text anymore, not to mention unsafe and increasingly illegal. I used to be a pro at it, but now with physical keyboards falling by the wayside, there needs to be a new solution aside from actually calling people (Who likes calling people anyway?). Google’s new voice actions are by far the best solution I have ever come across. Vlingo offers a similar service, but without as many actions, and with, in my opinion, inferior voice-recognition ability.

To send someone a text, you simply touch the microphone button on the Google search bar, or on your home screen (if you placed it there) and say “text [recipient name] [message]”. For example, I would say “Text Jimmy Smith, Do you want to play racquetball tonight?” Then a box comes up with the message, and after confirming the recipient and the message, you can just press send. Now you have successfully sent a text message while only touching your phone twice. Pretty cool, right? It gets cooler!

Say you feel like listening to some Pearl Jam. Press the microphone button and say “Listen to Pearl Jam”. Now a box will pop up asking you which application you’d like to use. I typically use Pandora, so I selected it as my default music program for Google voice actions. Now when I say “Listen to Pearl Jam”, Pandora opens and starts the Pearl Jam channel immediately. You can use this to play music stored on your device as well. It also supports last.fm, Slacker, and Rdio in addition to Pandora.

I did run into one problem with voice actions. When I first started using it, it failed to recognize names in my contacts list. After doing a little research, I found that others were having the same problem, and that it was easily remedied by backing up your contacts to gmail, completely erasing your contacts on your phone, then resyncing the contacts from gmail. After doing that, the contact recognition worked like a champ.

Using voice commands on your phone in public still feels very awkward to me, and as a result, I mainly use this feature in the privacy of my own home or car. However, I do feel that this technology holds a firm place in the future of smartphones. Someday we will all be walking around talking to our phones like it is second nature.

Voice search for Android is available for all Android phones, but the newest version, with the actions I talked about and more, is only available for Android 2.2 (Froyo). You can find out more about Google’s voice actions, including a list of all the actions you can utilize at Voice Actions.

Jesse is editor for iPhone repair techs at iFixyouri.

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