PHONES:Android Updates As Google Announces New Nexus Phones.
SAN FRANCISCO — Every day, Google crawls and indexes the entire Internet to help deliver the best search results on its website. Now the company wants to apply the same firepower to dig through applications on smartphones that run the Android operating system.
In an announcement at the company’s office here Thursday, Google showed off an updated version of its Android mobile operating system, called “KitKat 4.4,” that can search for information both on the web and some smartphone apps. The updated operating system also flattens out parts of the user interface on Android smartphones and updates the company’s voice-recognition technology.
The Android update is included in a new smartphone, the Nexus 5, which is a Google-made device that has a high-resolution camera and large, 5-inch screen. The update will start to make its way to other Android-based phones in the coming weeks.
The larger Nexus phone, which was available Thursday on the Google Play store, is targeting buyers that have been migrating to larger mobile devices. And with the phone, Google will be going to head-to-head with Samsung, the pioneer of big-screen phones that also run the Android operating system.
The Nexus 5 does offer features that separate it from competitors. Specifically, the camera on the Nexus 5 includes a small gyroscope built into the lens that ensures photos are not blurry if the user’s hands shake while snapping a picture. The company also added new software meant to reduce blur, add contrast and brighten images taken in dark places.
In a demonstration, the company showed how searching for a recipe will get results on the web as well as within a recipe app on the smartphone. The search feature will work with a limited number of app makers when it is available later in November, including IMDB, Moviefone, Etsy, OpenTable and Trulia.
“There are two different worlds on your phone,” apps and the web, said Sundar Pichai, a senior vice president at Google. “We are now beginning to bring those apps and the web together.”
Other updates from the company on Thursday seemed to take on Apple’s latest operating system, iOS 7, including improvements to voice recognition technology that’s similar to the Siri feature in Apple’s iPhones.
“Over the past year, we’ve made another 25 percent in improvement to speech recognition accuracy,” said Johanna Wright, a vice president at Google. Ms. Wright said that in the past voice recognition software would become confused by people’s names — which “Jennifer” are you trying to call? — or by attempting to differentiate between the words “pitchers and pictures,” which “sound very similar but mean different things.”
In the latest updates to the company’s voice recognition, Ms. Wright said Google has tried to resolve these issues by tapping additional data to help understand the type of query someone is making.
Also in the KitKat update, Emoji, the more elaborate cousins of emoticons, are now included in Hangouts and text-based chats, which have a smooth and cartoonlike feel.
A 16-gigabyte model of the Nexus 5 will cost $349 and the 32-gigabyte model will cost $399.
KitKat will begin rolling out to some devices on Thursday, including the older Nexus phones numbered 4, 7 and 10. Other phones will be receiving updates in the coming weeks.
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