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]
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…