Speak and ye shall find
Demoing on an Android powered Droid, the Google veep spoke the words "pictures of Barack Obama at the G8 summit with the French president," and hey presto, no sooner said than done, images appearing to match the query appeared on the screen.
Not satisfied with impressing the crowd in English, Gundotra showed off his Mandarin, using the Chinese version of the self-same Mobile app to search for a Beijing McDonalds. Low and behold, with the demo gods smiling on his presentation, a list of McDonalds locations and a map appears. The crowd, filled with Googlers, goes wild.
Gundotra proceeded to call up a Japanese speaking Googler to demo the app in Japanese and to no one's surprise, but much frenzied, overenthusiastic applause, it worked flawlessly too. Shocker.
But say your Japanese isn't exactly what you would call up to scratch. No problem, says Gundotra. Simply speak into your phone in one language, hit the translate button and not only will your translation come back in seconds, your phone will also transcribe it in text form for hapless tourists to wave around at locals. Of course, Google blatantly stole this idea from Star Wars, but no matter.
Going on to say research backed up the notion people didn't like to be separated from their mobiles by more than a metre, Gundotra said his firm had also come up with an app called "My Location" in Google Maps, which purportedly saved some nine seconds per user by rendering maps quicker - although he neglected to say how exactly.
