Google Updates Voice Search For iOS, Does Siri Have a Rival for iPhone, iPad

Google upgraded its search app for the iPhone and iPad with new voice search functionality that could pose a tough challenge to Apple's Siri.

"When you have a question, finding the answer should be effortless - wherever you are and whatever device you're using," a Google search engineer, Kenneth Bongort wrote in a blog post. "The new Google Search app for iPhone and iPad helps you to do just that with enhanced voice search that answers any question with the comprehensive Google search results."

The app is available for free download and as you open it, you are greeted with a message that says, "Try our new voice search."

You can simply click on the icon of a microphone and speak your question into your device. Google will instantly tell you the answer aloud if your question is short and simple. It will give a list of possible answers and links on the screen when you ask a more complicated question.

"Getting an answer is as simple as tapping on the microphone icon and asking a question like, 'Is United Airlines flight 318 on time?' Your words appear as you speak, you get your answer immediately and if it's short and quick, like the status and departure time of your flight Google tells you the answer aloud," Bongort wrote.

The application provides answers to an increasingly wide variety of questions through the Knowledge Graph, which, the company claims, enables search technology an understanding of people, places and things in the real world.

The Knowledge Graph enables users to search for things, people or places that Google knows about - landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more - and instantly get information that's relevant to the query.

"Google's Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook," Google's Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering wrote in an earlier company post. "It's also augmented at a much larger scale - because we're focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it's tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web."