Ig-pay Atin-lay Oice-vay Earch-say

Posted by Martin Jansche and Alex Salcianu, Google Speech Team

As you might know, Google Voice Search is available in more than two dozen languages and dialects, making it easy to perform Google searches just by speaking into your phone.

Today it is our pleasure to announce the launch of Pig Latin Voice Search!

What is Pig Latin you may ask? Wikipedia describes it as a language game where, for each English word, the first consonant (or consonant cluster) is moved to the end of the word and an “ay” is affixed (for example, “pig” yields “ig-pay” and “search” yields “earch-say”).

Our Pig Latin Voice Search is even more fun than our other languages, because when you speak in Pig Latin, our speech recognizer not only recognizes your piggy speech but also translates it automagically to normal English and does a Google search.



To configure Pig Latin Voice Search in your Android phone just go to Settings, select “Voice input & output settings”, and then “Voice recognizer settings”. In the list of languages you’ll see Pig Latin. Just select it and you are ready to roll in the mud!

It also works on iPhone with the Google Search app. In the app, tap the Settings icon, then "Voice Search" and select Pig Latin.

Ave-hay un-fay ith-way Ig-pay Atin-lay.


Pig Latin Voice Search works on Android 2.2 (Froyo) and later Android versions. If you don't already have Google Voice Search on your Android phone, scan or tap this QR code to download it.

The list of languages and dialects now supported by Google Voice Search includes:

• US English, UK English, Australian English, Indian English, South African English
• Spanish from Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Latin America
• French (France), Italian, and Portuguese (Brazil)
• German (Germany) and Dutch
• Russian, Polish, and Czech
• Turkish
• Japanese, Korean, Mandarin (Mainland China and Taiwan), and Cantonese
• Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia
• Afrikaans and isiZulu
• Latin
• Pig Latin

Two Cities, One Week: Charlotte, North Carolina

[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community Blog]

Fresh off launching business outreach and support in Madison yesterday, we’re now adding our fifth city to the mix: Charlotte, North Carolina. Starting today, we’ll offer dedicated support for the more than 40,000 local businesses in the Charlotte area, helping them get noticed on Google and get more customers at their door.

More than 20 percent of all searches on Google each day have a local intent, and we want to make it as easy as possible for Charlotte businesses to get discovered whether folks are looking for BBQ, furniture stores or electricians. We’ve already begun sending the Places starter kits directly to local businesses. In addition to instructions on how to make the most of Google’s free online tools, it also features some ideas on how to get your customers to share their great experiences by rating and reviewing your business on Google. If you don’t receive a kit within the next few days, any Charlotte area business can also request one for free through the Google Places Catalog.

And, for businesses that are already “Recommended on Google,” we’re also including our NFC-enabled window decals that allow anyone with an NFC-enabled device, such as the Nexus S, to tap their phone against the decal and see all the relevant information about that business.

We’re excited to be in kicking things off in Charlotte and look forward to working with its great business community over the next several months.

Posted by Sameer Mahmood, Local Marketing Team

Word of Mouth: Introducing Voice Search for Indonesian, Malaysian and Latin American Spanish

Posted by Linne Ha, International Program Manager

Read more about the launch of Voice Search in Latin American Spanish on the Google América Latina blog.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of Voice Search in Indonesian, Malaysian, and Latin American Spanish, making Voice Search available in over two dozen languages and accents since our first launch in November 2008. This accomplishment could not have been possible without the help of local users in the region - really, we couldn’t have done it without them. Let me explain:

In 2010 we launched Voice Search in Dutch, the first language where we used the “word of mouth” project, a crowd-sourcing effort to collect the most accurate voice data possible.The traditional method of acquiring voice samples is to license the data from companies who specialize in the distribution of speech and text databases. However, from day one we knew that to build the most accurate Voice Search acoustic models possible, the best data would come from the people who would use Voice Search once it launched - our users.

Since then, in each country, we found small groups of people who were avid fans of Google products and were part of a large social network, either in local communities or on online. We gave them phones and asked them to get voice samples from their friends and family. Everyone was required to sign a consent form and all voice samples were anonymized. When possible, they also helped to test early versions of Voice Search as the product got closer to launch.

Building a speech recognizer is not just limited to localizing the user interface. We require thousands of hours of raw data to capture regional accents and idiomatic speech in all sorts of recording environments to mimic daily life use cases. For instance, when developing Voice Search for Latin American Spanish, we paid particular attention to Mexican and Argentinean Spanish. These two accents are more different from one another than any other pair of widely-used accents in all of South and Central America. Samples collected in these countries were very important bookends for building a version of Voice Search that would work across the whole of Latin America. We also chose key countries such as Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia to bridge the divergent accent varieties.

As an International Program Manager at Google, I have been fortunate enough to travel around the world and meet many of our local Google users. They often have great suggestions for the products that they love, and word of mouth was created with the vision that our users could participate in developing the product. These Voice Search launches would not have been possible without the help of our users, and we’re excited to be able to work together on the product development with the people who will ultimately use our products.

Google Canada offers SMBs a 'net'

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the heart and soul of the Canadian economy. There are over 2 million SMBs in Canada; And even though more than 80% of the Canadian population is online, we estimate that only 1.2 million of these businesses have websites. What’s more, our research shows that of the small businesses that are not yet online, 70% would consider establishing and developing a website if it was easy to do and free of charge.

We have seen firsthand how SMBs grow and flourish when they maintain an online presence -- and we firmly believe all Canadian businesses should benefit from online technologies. So, we want to help ensure that all Canadian SMBs have access to the tools and resources necessary for creating websites and marketing online.

Today we’re announcing the ‘Canada Get Your Businesses Online’ (GYBO.ca) program. GYBO.ca is a joint effort by Google, RBC, The Globe and Mail, Rogers, CIRA, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Silver Lining Limited, and Yola.com, to help SMBs create websites and understand the vast opportunities of online marketing. Over the next year, we hope to help 100,000 Canadian businesses build websites and reach customers online.

If you’re a Canadian small-business owner, you’ve got some good news coming your way. Starting today, you are eligible -- and encouraged! -- to take your first step toward enhancing your online presence. To help Canadian businesses get online, the GYBO.ca team will provide the following resources:

• Free and easy website hosting

• Free web address

• Free online marketing advice and tools

To read more about the GYBO.ca program and about how you can take advantage of these tools, please visit our website.

Posted by: Chris O'Neill, Managing Director Google Canada

Next Up: Madison, Wisconsin

[Cross-posted from the Hotpot Community Blog]

We’ve been focused a lot over the past few months on raising awareness and spreading the word about how Google Places and Hotpot can help people discover great places and help businesses get more customers in the door. Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to our quickly growing group of cities taking part in this campaign: Madison, Wisconsin.

With its large student population, growing tech community — including the Google office that opened in 2007 — and rich heritage surrounding small businesses, the capital of Wisconsin is an exciting addition. We’re really looking forward to working with the more than 15,000 local businesses in the area, helping them to get noticed on Google using our free suite of tools as part of Google Places.

In addition to having a dedicated team that will work with local businesses throughout Dane County, we’ve also begun mailing Google Places starter kits to thousands of local businesses in the area. These kits include instructions on how any business can claim their free Place page, as well as some samples of materials to help business owners encourage their customers to rate and review them on Google.

For those businesses who are already “Recommended on Google,” we’ll also be distributing our NFC-enabled window decals. These allow users with NFC-enabled devices, such as the Nexus S, to tap their phone against the decal and see all the information about that business.

As part of this launch, we’ve also partnered with the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce to offer a series of workshops beginning in early April that are open to all chamber members and will focus on step-by-step instructions and counseling on how Dane County businesses can make sure they are effectively managing their presence online. If you’re interested in attending, please contact your Chamber of Commerce representative.

Posted by Jeff Aguero, Local Marketing Team

Reading tea leaves in the tourism industry: A Case Study in the Gulf Oil Spill

Posted by Hyunyoung Choi and Paul Liu, Senior Economists

A few years ago, our in-house economists, Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi, demonstrated how to “predict the present” with monthly visitor arrivals to Hong Kong. We took this idea further to see if search queries could predict the future. If users start to research their travel plans some weeks or months in advance, then intuitively shouldn’t we be able to extend "predicting the present" into "predicting the future?" We decided to test it out by focusing on a region whose tourism was recently severely impacted: Florida’s gulf coast.

With the travel industry still in the midst of recovering from a deep recession, the Gulf Oil spill had the potential to do significant economic damage. Our case study on the Gulf Oil spill helped find useful insight into people’s future travel plans to Florida; in fact, we found that travel search queries actually were good predictors for trips to Florida, and destinations within Florida, about 4 weeks later.

The results we saw surprised us. Google Insights for Search suggested that at least with respect to hotel bookings (using data from Smith Travel Research, Inc.), the aggregate effect of the oil spill was modest on Florida travel, since travelers tended to shift their destinations from the affected regions on the west coast to the east coast or central regions of Florida. In particular, hotel bookings for affected areas along the Gulf coast were 4.25% less than predicted, and unaffected areas along the Atlantic coast were 4.89% greater than predicted.

You can read the full case study here or try your own hand at predicting the future!

Games, auctions and beyond

Posted by Yossi Matias, Senior Director, Head of Israel R&D Center

In an effort to advance the understanding of market algorithms and Internet economics, Google has launched an academic research initiative focused on the underlying aspects of online auctions, pricing, game-theoretic strategies, and information exchange. Twenty professors from three leading Israeli academic institutions - the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and the Technion - will receive a Google grant to conduct research for three years.

In the past two decades, we have seen the Internet grow from a scientific network to an economic force that positively affects the global economy. E-commerce, online advertising, social networks and other new online business models present fascinating research questions and topics of study that can have a profound impact on society.

Consider online advertising, which is based on principles from algorithmic game theory and online auctions. The Internet has enabled advertising that is more segmented and measurable, making it more efficient than traditional advertising channels, such as newspaper classifieds, radio spots, and television commercials. These measurements have led to better pricing models, which are based on online real-time auctions. The original Internet auctions were designed by the industry, based on basic economic principles which have been known and appreciated for forty years.

As the Internet grows, online advertising is becoming more sophisticated, with developments such as ad-exchanges, advertising agencies which specialize in online markets, and new analytic tools. Optimizing value for advertisers and publishers in this new environment may benefit from a better understanding of the strategies and dynamics behind online auctions, the main driving tool of Internet advertising.

These grants will foster collaboration and interdisciplinary research by bringing together world renowned computer scientists, engineers, economists and game theorists to analyze complex online auctions and markets. Together, they will help bring this area of study into mainstream academic scientific research, ultimately advancing the field to the benefit of the industry at large.

The professors who received research grants include:

• Hebrew University: Danny Dolev, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein, Noam Nisan (Computer Science and Engineering); Liad Blumrosen, Alex Gershkov, Eyal Winter (Economics); Michal Feldman and Ilan Kremer (Business). The last six are also members of the Center for the Study of Rationality.
• Tel Aviv University: Yossi Azar, Amos Fiat, Haim Kaplan, and Yishay Mansour (Computer Science); Zvika Neeman (Economics); Ehud Lehrer and Eilon Solan (Mathematics); and Gal Oestreicher (Business).
• Technion: Seffi Naor (Computer Science); Ron Lavi (Industrial Engineering); Shie Mannor and Ariel Orda (Electrical Engineering).

In addition to providing the funds, Google will offer support by inviting the researchers to seminars, workshops, faculty summits and brainstorming events. The results of this research will be published for the benefit of the Internet industry as a whole, and will contribute to the evolving discipline of market algorithms.