As the smartphone world waits to see how the patent battle between Apple and HTC plays out, Google continues to forge ahead with mobile innovations. On Wednesday Google announced yet another application for its Android mobile operating system that adds a new twist to smartphone searches.
As Google sees it, sometimes typing to get the right search suggestion takes too long — and speaking a query through the voice options may not be best in a quiet room. Enter Gesture Search, an experimental application from Google Labs that works with Android-powered devices running Android 2.0 and above in the U.S.
“Gesture Search lets you quickly find a contact, an installed application, a bookmark, or a music track from hundreds or thousands of items by simply drawing alphabet gestures on the touchscreen,” explained Google Research Scientist Yang Li.
Sleight-of-Hand Searching
If you want to call your friend Kim, you would open Gesture Search and draw the letter K on the touchscreen with your finger. Gesture Search would then offer up a list of items that have words starting with the letter K. You can either scroll down the list of results to find Kim’s name or write more letters to refine the search.
What if your handwriting isn’t so hot? Google anticipated that. If the K you draw in Gesture Search looks something like a B, then you’ll get results for items that begin with both K and B. If you make a mistake of some sort, you can also erase a query by crossing it out horizontally. A gesture running left to right will erase the entire query, while a gesture from right to left removes the last letter or space in the query.
Li said Gesture Search improves search quality by learning from your search history, so Kim’s contact info will jump to the top…