I've never used any type of voice input on any phone. My native tongue is not English, it's Croatian; phones don't cope with it so well. But even in English, saying "call Julia" or something to that effect is a) not as reliable as typing a number or selecting it from the phone book and b) you look silly talking to your phone.
Hence, I'm skeptical about Google's latest iPhone application: voice search. Instead of typing in a search phrase, you simply say it to the iPhone; “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” is the example used by the New York Times, and it should return the results within seconds. The application is free, and should show up in Apple's App Store sometime today.
First, let me be clear about one thing: this is a great idea, and one day, far in the future, voice input to various pieces of hardware around us might become a part of our everyday life. But right now, I'll eat my hat if this thing is reliable enough - and we're talking street conditions, crowded coffee house conditions; in short, normal situations - to use on an everyday basis. I bet that two times out of three Google's software will misunderstand you and give you the wrong results. And I bet that in the end, the majority of users who try the feature out will go back to standard (virtual) keyboard input.
True, the fact that typing on the iPhone's keyboard is nowhere near as fast as typing on a regular sized keyboard gives some credit to this idea. However, again, if you're in Internet search/web browsing mode - meaning you're not holding the phone next to your ear, you're holding it in your hands - it'll probably be easier to simply type in whatever search phrase you need.
In any case, we'll all be able to try it out very soon, and I hope that Google will prove me wrong on this one. But somehow, at least for now, I doubt it.