Whether you are a web designer, web developer or love watching how technology unfolds and hits the consumer market — then this article should be a good read. And while web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent, that’s exactly what this article deals with.
Great article on CNN concerning the latest web trends of 2010
Dragon Dictation – Speech-to-text translation
Speech-to-text translation isn’t a new idea, but Dragon Dictation for the iPhone turns the concept into a functional reality. The app makes it easy for you to dictate notes, e-mails or text messages, which are then instantly converted to text. With a click of the button, you can go on to send your dictated text via e-mail or SMS, or to save it to the clipboard. Best of all, Dragon Dictation is completely free (for a limited time).
The application itself has a minimalist design: When you launch it, you’ll be able to hit a button and record your dictation — and that’s it. After the initial voice-to-text transcription, you can also edit via text or voice, replace poorly transcribed words with suggested alternatives and select words or phrases to delete.
Dragon Search - Search the entire web with your voice
The app’s design is very simple to use and lightening fast. After you launch it, simply click the red button to say your search query. Hit “done” and you’ve just searched practically the entire web with your voice. Results are displayed on single page views per search engine, and you can use your finger to quickly scroll through the horizontal toolbar to arrive at your destination of choosing.
On December 04, 2009 Google announced that they will design and customize your search results based on your past search activity even if you are not signed in your Google account. What it means is, the search results you see on your computer may differ slightly from what someone else might see on their computer. Google is now keeping track of your search history from the last 180 days on your browser’s cookies and produce the search results based on your search behavior. You can learn more about this feature on Google’s official blog
This is an important piece of information for all web designers, web developers, website owners and SEO professionals who monitor their website rankings on Google. You will see a difference in search rankings dependent on what computer you are searching on. In order to see the global search results, you can simply turn off this feature from Web History which is shown on top right corner of Google.com. This will tell Google that you do not wish to customize the search results based on search activities performed on that computer.
This Summer a friend pointed down and asked me “…Do you know the name of that flower?” and I replied “No, I don’t…” we looked at each other and then looked down at our hand-held devices, an iPhone and a BlackBerry. Both have internet capabilities, but what can we do? Search the Encyclopedia Of Life (which exists by the way and is a tremendous ongoing project that is creating the first ever complete encyclopedia and index of every organism that exists on this planet)
Then the idea of a “visual search” came into our minds, what if we could take a picture with our phone and search for the name that way… This has to be something that Google is working on we assumed.
A month ago I was watching Inside The mind of Google that was on CNBC. And there it was – Google was working on Visual Search.
Enter Google Goggles
It’s quite amazing… A picture is worth a thousand words ( as any good web designer would say) No need to type your search anymore. Just take a picture. Find out what businesses are nearby. Just point your phone at a store.
Google says that this is just the beginning – and that it’s not quite perfect yet, it works well for some things, but not for all. And it looks like they are not yet recognizing items from the Encyclopedia of Life quite yet, as it works for landmarks, Books, Places, and Wine to name a few.
Oh yea… It’s available for Android – Of Course.
