Google is back in the news again after it emerged that the firm recently filed a patent for technology which could lead to voice-assisted search. Patent no 7027987, which was published on the US Patent and Trademark Office website on Tuesday, is for a "voice interface for a search engine".
The patent describes the interface as "a system (that) provides search results from a voice search query. The system receives a voice search query from a user, derives one or more recognition hypotheses, each being associated with a weight, from the voice search query, and constructs a weighted boolean query using the recognition hypotheses. The system then provides the weighted boolean query to a search system and provides the results of the search system to a user."