Voice search has found success on all manner of smartphone with Google, Yahoo and Bing all offering users the option to speak their search terms. According to this report emanating from Beijing, Baidu, the giant search provider in China, has published hiring specifications for a full staff of speech recognition specialists, including “a head for speech recognition technology, speech recognition engineers, senior speech recognition engineers and so on.”

Baidu will need to introduce voice-based search just to stay at parity with Google (which is having problems of a different kind in its efforts to grow its Chinese operations). Industry analysts in China see Baidu’s voice search targeting mobile audiences and perhaps taking aim at delivery of music and entertainment. On July 2, it signed a deal with China Unicom to ensure that the carrier’s 3G phones ship with Baidu software pre-installed to facilitate search of text, images, MP3 files and news. China Unicom will introduce the iPhone later this month.

Intrepid readers will know that Baidu introduced “voice search” involving live operators over two years ago. Based on that experience, it knows the mix of questions it can expect form phone users. Like Google, it is not shy about introducing new features and functions to its core of interactive services. Analysts believe that Baidu maintains a huge lead in market share, with about two-thirds of the search business compared to 26% for Google. Yet, as Opus Research’s Greg Sterling notes in this post on Search Engine Land, Google introduced its flavor of Chinese-language voice search in November 2009. As Greg points out, there are over 700 million mobile subscribers in China and that China Unicom has twice the number of subscribers as Verizon Wireless.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile search, Google