Google has filed United States Patent #7,027,987, which details voice interface for a search engine. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has his name on the patent, along with other Google employees and inventors Alexander Mark Franz, Monika H. Henzinger, and Brian Christopher Milch. While the patent is replete with arcane vocabulary and schematics concerning voice-processing technology, it also has sections that clearly discuss the future: "The client devices may include devices such as mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers, laptops, personal digital assistants, telephones, or the like, capable of connecting to the network. The client devices may transmit data over the network or receive data from the network via a wired, wireless, or optical connection."
Google expert Stephen Arnold was of the followingi opinion: "Google is optimizing voice search to run on Google"s data centers. There"s no limit to how they can scale it. They can embed the function on mobile phones, on browsers, on chips, and even on big mainframes. It"s entirely device independent." Competitors Microsoft and Yahoo have both introduced voice search applications, but Google isn"t about to let them get the upper hand. Arnold said the Googleplex, hundreds of thousands of processors scattered throughout Google"s data centers, plays a central role in the forthcoming voice search functions. Because of the power of Google"s data centers, other search competitors will find it difficult to duplicate Google"s voice search applications, he argued.