We’re back! It was a bumpy ride, but I used the traditional summer slowdown to move to a new host and connect with an experienced team of professionals specialized in helping businesses develop converged Web and Mobile solutions in preparation for a new-look MSearchGroove.

But the real news is Pump Up The Volume: An Assessment of Voice-Enabled Web Search on the iPhone, MSearchGroove’s new-release white paper assessing the performance of voice search on an iPhone offered by ChaCha, Google and Vlingo (using Yahoo!), which you can download here. The report is especially timely, coming on the heels of today’s announcement by Google that it has fine-tuned the mobile app versions of its Google Voice service for Blackberry and Android. (More on the user experience via this detailed post at GigaOm.)

The top-level findings: ChaCha, a fast-growing SMS mobile search service available in the U.S. in the industry, “proved superior” to two other voice-enabled search options for the iPhone: the Google Mobile App with Voice and Vlingo for iPhone, a voice enabled application that allows users to direct their spoken queries to Google or Yahoo! (For the purposes of this study Vlingo provided a spoken interface to the Yahoo! search engine.)

ChaCha proved to offer exceptional results, with its human guides interpreting the search query accurately in the majority of cases. According to the study, ChaCha interpreted natural language search queries, that is, queries asked as questions, accurately in 94.4 percent of the tests and delivered an accurate search result in 88.9 percent of cases. The Google voice recognition technology interpreted queries accurately in 16.7 percent of tests and delivered accurate search results in 22.2 percent of tests. The Vlingo for iPhone voice recognition technology correctly interpreted queries in 72.2 percent of cases and delivered accurate results (via Yahoo!) in 27.8 percent of tests.

My personal thanks to esteemed colleague and associate Peggy Albright, the study’s lead analyst and principal author, and Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News and a leading authority on market and product opportunities created by the maturing of speech technology. Bill is also the president of president of TMA Associates and I look forward to showcasing his work and ideas on MSG soon.

Tomorrow: More report findings and surprising observations on the dismal state of mobile search.

Disclaimer: The complete report is available for free download here. This white paper is published by MSearchGroove. It contains the findings of independent research and analysis carried out by Peggy Albright, Albright Communications, and Peggy Anne Salz, MSearchGroove in January 2009. The research methodology was developed by Peggy Albright. The research was sponsored by ChaCha. The opinions expressed in this white paper are those of Peggy Albright and Peggy Anne Salz, and do not reflect the opinions of the organizations referenced in this paper.

Tags: ChaCha, Google, iPhone, Mobile Advertising, mobile analytics, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networks, Vlingo, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Research, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization, White Papers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.