Over the weekend, I downloaded and demonstrated Google’s new Voice Search and StreetViews to my friends that have iPhones. The Streetview feature (once I found which icon to tap) is incredibly fast and functional, much more so than on my aging PowerBook 12″ laptop.

The Voice Search worked very well for me with a 95% success rate on searches. I was careful to remove any extraneous words from the search and use a cadence that I had perfected with Goog-411. Friends and family were seeing 60-70% success rates so it appears that some mutual training needs to take place.

Apparently though, if you are British, there is a slim to none chance that the Voice Search will return a meaningful result. According the Telegraph (via Local Mobile Search):

Here’s a formal statement posted on Local Mobile Search that Google offered regarding why the voice search app has trouble with British accents:

The acoustic model for Voice Search was trained, in part, by using data from GOOG-411 which has only launched broadly in the US. Since the acoustic model was trained using mostly American accents, the tool currently works best when receiving queries with American accents. While you can still download the Google Mobile App and turn on the Voice Search here, we’ve turned off the voice functionality by default when the app is downloaded from anywhere outside of the US. We don’t have any specific launches to announce at this time, but we think this is exciting new technology and the speech recognition and understanding will only get better for other accents and jargon as we keep working on it