Google’s latest voice-based app for its Android phones, dubbed ‘Voice Action’ will allow users to carry out tasks via spoken commands rather than pressing buttons or keys.

Even though the iPhone 4 has been a huge success, all through the pre and post-launch hype Android phones have continued to sell well. According to one research firm America, Android was the best selling smartphone operating system in the US in the second quarter of 2010.

At a recent news conference Google claimed to be activating more than 200,000 Android devices a day. There has been a steadily growing groundswell of support for their Android operating system since it emerged as the first viable competitor for Apple.

This is partly down to the extremely strong emotions that seem to swirl around Apple, which has created a huge community of Apple ‘Fanboys’ but an equally large community of those that hate everything that Apple stand for.

While this means that Android get plenty of free publicity through the constant buzz and counterbuzz on internet forums, their success is mainly down to just delivering a consistently impressive product.

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Constant development and innovations (partly due to many developers favouring their platform over Apple’s) means that Android is often ahead of the curve of Apple, or offering something slightly different that appeals to people who prefer to avoid Apple.

The company believes new capabilities like voice actions will keep it ahead of the game.

“Before it was easy to search the web using voice but people do a lot more than just search the web,” said product manager Hugo Barra.

“Now you can voice up text messages, e-mail a reminder to yourself, set your alarm clock, get directions, find music, open a map and call places.”

Mr Barra explains how this latest application is building on the success of their voice searching app, claiming it “represents the most significant progress Google has made in speech recognition ever since we launched voice search about two years ago”.

He also revealed that one in four searches done on Android is done using voice search.

Android will hope that they can continue to keep keeping Apple honest.

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