Where is the new Google iPhone App?
***Update: The App has been released. You can download it here.***
On Friday the New York Times announced that there would be a new iPhone app by Google.
Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.
Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.
But as of today the app still is not available. Now Techcrunch is reporting that the availability was delayed because of Apple’s approval process.
Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review, instead getting their updates via the standard iPhone developer tool, which has said “in review” for the last few days.
It seems to me that Apple’s iPhone App approval process has been broken from the beginning. They really need to find a way to honor the hard work of all the iPhone developers out there. At this time a developer creating an iPhone app can have no confidence that there App will be approved. Some of the best apps out there may not be developed because developers are scared Apple may not approve their app.
Here’s a Youtube video of the new app. It looks awesome!