Google’s latest voice search features now available in Chrome

A week after it was announced at Google I/O 2013, Google’s conversational search is now operational in the latest version of Chrome. With Chrome 27, you can click the microphone icon in the search box on Google.com, opening a dedicated search page that listens for your commands. We have tested the feature and results are returned quickly with accuracy.

The new update adds the ability to understand and link queries using Google’s Knowledge Graph, relating successive searches to the same subject. For example, if you ask “How old is Sergey Brin?,” you can follow that up with “Who is he married to?” and Google’s contextual search algorithms intelligently relate that to your original question. While voice search has been available in Chrome for a while now, Google Search will soon offer the option to say “OK Google,” prompting Chrome to respond with no buttons needed. It will also personalize results if you opt-in to Google’s search experiments. Not all of the new features are available right now, and Google also appears to be suffering from a few early teething problems, so the conversational search feature might not be available in all regions just yet.