As reported on MobileMarketer, MSearchGroove recently evaluated three mobile voice search tools for the iPhone- Google, Yahoo and ChaCha.

The researchers from MSearchGroove evaluated the overall performance of the voice-enabled mobile services from ChaCha, Google and Vlingo for iPhone with Yahoo by asking a series of 18 queries from six typical mobile search categories such as navigation, direction, local information, general information, social and long-tail.

In the category of queries asked as questions, ChaCha accurately interpreted 94.4 percent of the tests and delivered accurate search results in 88.9 percent of cases. Google’s results on the other hand were pretty dismal. On the other hand, Googles voice recognition technology only interpreted 16.7 percent of queries accurately during testing and delivered accurate results 22.2 percent of the time. Vlingo for iPhones interpretation of voice queries came in at a respectable 72.2 percent however the answers it delivered via Yahoo were only accurate 27.8 percent of the time.  Other than ChaCha, many of the tools are just not  quite ready for primetime yet.

So how can the real estate industry take advantage of the growth of mobile voice search?  While voice recognition software has come a long way in the past it is still not anywhere as accurate as using traditional phone functionality. While “push #3 for listing details” is not quite as sexy as voice recognition, it is a lot more reliable and a lot more ubiquitous.The ideal combination for communication with the largest number of consumers combines voice and text.

Mobile expert Susan Marshall, VP Marketing ChaCha says”

“While teens send about 3,000 text messages per month as compared to making 191 calls per month, voice is still a common method of communication by a large segment of the population, particularly the over 18 crowd,” she said.

“To provide the best possible mobile search user experience, we need to provide both voice and text search in an easy and accessible way.”

Since real estate consumers have so many different types of phones and phone usage habits,  the more flexible the applicaiton, the more valuable the mobile real estate search will become. Companies like VoicePad allows a real estate consumer to search via voice prompts and then receive more indepth listing information via voice, email or text.

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