Google has announced upgrades to its speech-recognition technology for Android and iOS devices, saying that search requests and other commands will be recognised and acted upon more quickly, even amid background noise. The key is something called Connectionist Temporal Classification technology, which, unlike older systems, does not focus as much on individual sounds and syllables, says the company, but on entire words.
When the Google app for iOS and Android updates on smart-phones, the new speech-recognition system is automatically included.