Google has launched a new video campaign on YouTube to highlight the abilities of its Voice Search features. While Voice Search is a very powerful tool, some find it hard to figure out exactly what to do with it. In a new series of videos on their new YouTube channel, Google promotes their “What you say is what you search” mantra.
They offer a few compelling examples, including:
- A guy in a hot tub who wants to find out how many calories he’s burning without destroying his phone.
- A bird watcher in a tree who doesn’t want to lose site of his target, but needs to identify the bird he’s looking at.
- A woman eating an ice cream cone who needs to know how to cure brain freeze ASAP.
Interesting examples that will probably spark ideas among those interested in Voice Search. What I find more interesting about these videos is that Google provides links to the actual search results inside the videos, challenging you to “Go ahead” and click the links on the phone. You can interact with the video to pull up the results from the search, providing some credibility to the service. (You can add links in your own YouTube videos using the Annotations feature, but you are limited in what you can link to.)
Keeping things moving on all fronts, Eric Schmidt re-ignited rumors of a Facebook-killer app called Google Me when he spoke at the Zeitgeist event. He didn’t get too specific, but did say that Google’s products would include more social elements later this year.
He didn’t talk about killing Facebook, but he did say that Google wants access to your Facebook contacts. This would be to grow and expand your social network. This would also give Google a better idea of who you are, who you’re connected to, and what type of ads you might want to see. Schmidt also added a somewhat controversial statement, saying:
“The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information.”
Presumably, this simply means having users to authorize Google to access their contacts in some way, but who knows. While the rumors focus around some monolithic Facebook-type service, I’m pretty sure Google isn’t going to try to re-invent the wheel here. The smarter option is to simply make their existing services more social by adding social context.
Users don’t want to join yet another social network, but they’re probably already using one or more Google services. Simply adding social hooks and context to their existing services would go a long way for Google in gathering more information about users and providing opportunities to show them ads. At the end of the day, that’s what they’re really after.