Google’s own version of Siri is coming to the iPhone and iPad “soon,” according to the company. On Wednesday Google announced an update for its Chrome app is now available for Android and that another update for the Chrome for iOS app will follow “over the coming days” and include Voice Search.
From Google’s blog post about it:
“You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter.”
Unlike Siri, this is not integrated into the operating system, and can only be accessed through the Chrome app.
Little by little, Google has been fine-tuning and improving its products that run on Apple’s operating system, and it’s having the effect of creating a Google layer on top of iOS.
Not only are all of Google’s major properties accessible in app form on iOS — from YouTube to Google Maps to Mail, Drive, Chrome, Search, Google+ and more — they often best what Apple has to offer. In addition, Google is finding ways to interconnect its apps, so iOS customers can jump from Google service to Google service fluidly. Earlier this month Google introduced a new setting for iOS developers that can enable app users to choose to set links in the Gmail iOS app to open in YouTube, Chrome or Google Maps, as appropriate, by default.
In April the company updated its Google Search app for iOS with Google Now, an assistant app that offers suggestions automatically based on behaviors and preferences expressed across Google’s apps and properties, all of which are on iOS.
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