India is adding close to 18 million mobile subscribers every month, and the Indian telecom regulator TRAI estimates [PDF] there were around 127 million wireless subscribers accessing data services (essentially GPRS/EDGE based mobile data services) at the end of September 2009. That is a sizeable number, and one that continues to grow. Mobile advertising, too, is beginning to make its presence felt. Moreover, Google already has some strong traction in the market. A Comscore September 2009 report estimates that Internet users in India spent up to a third of their online time on Google sites, a figure that is over three times the global average. Given such strong usage indicators of its services, Google will want to build on its brand strength, while simultaneously tapping into the fast growing mobile space. Google is already experimenting with multiple mobile products for its Indian audience, including Google Phone Search (search using voice calls to a toll-free number, with results being sent as a text message), Google SMS Search (search using text) and Google SMS Channels (SMS-based mobile communities). Putting a feature-rich, yet low-cost phone into the hands of its users appears the right next step.

It is in this context that a stripped-down version makes sense from Google’s perspective. Google has previously signaled that it considers India an unfriendly marketplace for smartphones. One can only speculate on what components might be tossed, but there are a few low-hanging fruit. India does not yet have 3G networks, given that the required spectrum has not been auctioned yet (although that will likely change soon, hopefully). Similarly, GPS and WLAN chipsets could be on the block, if Google is looking at cutting down on the radios. The display, too, could be swapped out for a less expensive and smaller LCD screen as opposed to the OLED display that the Nexus One currently boasts.

The resulting device would definitely not be what Google calls a Superphone, and therefore would not qualify for its online webstore. However, that might do a world of good to Google if it were indeed to launch such a phone in India where online commerce is still finding its feet. Apple found out the hard way that in a large country such as India, having a presence at the neighborhood handset retailer store is critical to driving uptake (Apple’s iPhone is primarily available only at select carrier-owned distribution stores, which are very limited). While Google might not have the experience of dealing with large third-party distributors, it has shown that it does not shy away from such challenges. Indeed, the very fact that it chose to launch its own distribution channel for the Nexus One in the US is testimony to that.

"Cat got your tongue?" my wife asked as we bumped along the freeway one recent afternoon. "I wonder where that phrase comes from?" she added a moment later.

Now here was an opportunity for a husband to be useful. I knew I could simply say, "Origin of the phrase 'cat got your tongue' " into Google's new Nexus One or an Apple iPhone loaded with Microsoft's new Bing search app — the two smartphones I happened to have in my possession — to answer her second question.

The spoken word is becoming an effective way to overcome the frustrations and limitations of typing on a smartphone. Google and Microsoft now offer speech-enabled Web search on a variety of mobile platforms. And a growing number of iPhone and Android apps — and services like Google Voice and YouTube's recent launch of automatic captioning of videos — can transcribe speech into text. The technology has evolved to a point where speech is a central feature on the Nexus One, allowing users to speak a tweet, an e-mail or a Facebook update.

"2010 is the year when speech goes mainstream," said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for Tellme Mobile Speech, a Mountain View company that became a unit of Microsoft in 2007. "There have been years and years of speech applications and many of them have failed, but you're hitting a convergence point where a lot of technologies are coming together."

Tellme already provides speech recognition technology for everything

from Bing searches to spoken commands for the sound system in Ford cars.

 

Mike Cohen, Google's manager of speech technology, says speech will soon be an option for almost every function of a mobile device.

"Our goal is to make speech input ubiquitously available," he said. "If you choose or prefer to speak, we want that to be a possibility."

Companies like Tellme and Google have been working on helping computers comprehend and respond to human speech for a decade. But only in the past few years — with the growth of computing power in mobile devices, high-speed Internet connections and "cloud" data networks — has speech technology become a viable means to interact with the Web through a smartphone.

That is not to say the technology has been perfected. Consider that recent search for "Origin of the phrase 'cat got your tongue.' "

Google nailed it, pointing to a Yahoo Web page that said the phrase may have originated long ago in the Middle East when liars had their tongues ripped out and fed to the king's cats. Bing's iPhone app didn't do so well. It interpreted the query as, "Origin of the free scat sky York time" — a response that might have pleased Lewis Caroll but that did little to help me.

Google's Nexus One, which went on sale in January, leans heavily on speech technology, including features like a voice dialer and voice search in the phone's native applications. The phone's touch keypad includes a small microphone key, which activates the speech feature.

Just don't use it to conduct business by e-mail or to have a sensitive conversation with your wife. When I spoke "How's it going, hon?" for a text message to my wife, the Nexus One sent the message as "Acetone Hun." (Fortunately, she does have a sense of humor.)

The Nexus One utility that allows you to look up Facebook friends by speaking their names guessed wrong more frequently than it guessed right, rendering the names of my friends Mike Antonucci and Allan Au, as, respectively, "Mike in synergy" and "L&I."

But for many spoken queries of just a few words — especially when the words are commonly used and not proper names — both search engines perform well, and the accuracy seems to have improved over the several months I've been consistently using the two services. Bing's iPhone app performs particularly well for spoken map searches.

Engineers say speech recognition accuracy will continue to improve, in part because the greatly increased volume of spoken queries produces much more data to refine the statistical models that search engines use to identify language.

"We still have a lot of work ahead of us," said Google's Cohen. "Compared to where things were a year ago, we've made dramatic improvements "... but it's not perfect by any means."

Accents are one problem that continues to vex engineers. But Cohen said Google is noticing that individual users who do voice searches are returning more frequently to use the service again — a key indication of growing accuracy and acceptance of speech services.

Google launched its iPhone app with speech recognition in late 2008, while Bing's iPhone app became available only in December. Both are free. Google also offers voice search applications that run on BlackBerry, Android and Nokia 60 phones, while Bing's app is also available for the BlackBerry and Windows Mobile operating systems

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While Apple's marketing machine generally downplays the threat to the iPhone posed by Google's new Nexus One mobile device, the company's lawyers see it differently.

The Nexus One, as well as other touch-screen phones manufactured by HTC for Google and other third parties, has caused "irreparable injury" to Apple's mobile franchise, according to court documents.

Apple claims HTC infringed on 20 patents governing a range of technologies. It filed legal actions against the Taiwanese company Tuesday with the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for Delaware.

"Apple has suffered irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law and will continue to suffer such irreparable injury unless the defendants' infringement" is enjoined by the court, Apple said in a complaint filed in the Delaware court.

Apple is asking the court to order HTC to pay unspecified damages and has requested that the International Trade Commission bar HTC from continuing to import the Nexus One and other phones into the United States.

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in a statement earlier this week. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own technology, not steal ours," said Jobs.

HTC manufacturers mobile devices for a number of third parties, but its recent introduction of the Nexus One for Google may be what caught Apple's attention. Like the iPhone, the Nexus One features a touch-screen, a built-in GPS, and downloadable applications.

The patents in question cover touch-screens, gesture recognition, scrolling, power management, and other technologies.

Amid rising competition in the mobile market, Apple is becoming increasingly aggressive in protecting what it believes is proprietary technology. The company sued Nokia in December, claiming the Finnish handset maker also infringed on iPhone patents. That case remains open.

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