Andy Baio sniffs out Google voice search for the iPhone

Posted by John Brownlee, November 19, 2008 12:16 AM | permalink

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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Discussion

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#1 posted by gruppler , November 19, 2008 6:39 AM

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...