Andy Baio sniffs out Google voice search for the iPhone

Waxy.org‘s Andy Baio has been doing some digital sherlocking, trying to discover how Google’s voice search on the iPhone actually works. As it turns out, it’s a lot more mysterious and clever than it would first appear:

ere’s my best guess: When you first start speaking into the microphone, the iPhone app opens a connection to Google’s server, waits for you to finish talking, and then does a quick and dirty conversion into a smaller binary representation of the waveform.

The waveform image is generated on the phone and displayed along with a “Working” indicator and the adorable “beep-boop” sounds. In the background, the binary file is being sent as a POST request to http://www.google.com/m/appreq/gmiphone.

The next step: spoofing requests.

Deconstructing Google Mobiles Voice Search on the iPhone [Waxy]

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One Response to Andy Baio sniffs out Google voice search for the iPhone

  1. gruppler says:

    Wow, amazing observation skills! Anyone with basic reasoning skills and a packet sniffer could figure this out. I wonder if he knows what the word “binary” actually means…or maybe his computer is able to store data in analog…

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