"By installing Offline Gmail, you’re able to use the normal Gmail interface to read and write mail, search, and organize, even when there’s no internet connection," explains Gmail software engineer Aaron Whyte. "And Flaky Connection mode speeds up Gmail when your connection is slow or unreliable."

"Since we first launched in Labs, we’ve heard from a lot of you who tried Offline Gmail, and your feedback helped us make a lot of improvements," adds Whyte.

Google recently added a couple of new features for offline Gmail. These are an option to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use, and the ability to send attachments while offline.

"Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients — they’re used to being able to access their mail whether or not they’re online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser," says Whyte.

To utilize the offline feature in Gmail, just turn it on and adjust your offline settings from the "offline" tab in Gmail’s settings.

Related Articles:

> Gmail Aims to Save Embarrassment Yet Again

> Gmail Gets a New Label Feature

> Google Adds Google Docs Previews to Gmail

Website Optimizer is a tool from Google that allows users to perform simple A/B and multivariate testing on websites to see what works and what doesn’t. WebProNews discussed the tool at length earlier this year. Here is a webinar video that will familiarize you with it as well:

"Website Optimizer handles splitting a website’s traffic, serving different variations, and crunching the numbers to find statistical significance," Google says. "Creating experiments with Website Optimizer usually involves a lot of back and forth between your website and the Website Optimizer interface. Using the API, you can integrate Website Optimizer into your platform. In short, you can create and launch experiments from whatever tool you use to edit your site."

The API is an extension of the Google Analytics API, and is part of Google Analytics Labs. Being a labs feature means that it may not be perfect, and users may experience some bugs.

Google says that developers should look at the Google Analytics Data API Protocol document for general information about the GA feeds. The sections on Quota Policy, Audience, Getting Started, and Authentication are relevant to the Website Optimizer API.

Google Transit Graduates, Gets Wrapped Into Maps

Oh, well.  You can’t ask for everything, and in this case, that includes widespread coverage – Google Transit is aware of routes in only ten American states.  Christoph Oehler, a product manager, promises, “We’re still working hard to make Google Transit useful for as many people as possible, and we’ll keep you posted as we add new regions.”

And if you can get past those minor problems, this truly is a positive development.  Google Transit’s departure from Google Labs involves an integration with Google Maps – now, some people will get a clickable option to “Take Public Transit” as they plan routes.  As always, distances and elapsed times are measured, and in some cases, there’s even a driving-versus-transit cost comparison.

So, yes – Google Transit is good, and it’s nice to see it leave Google Labs.  The move may have (slightly) bigger implications, though.

In the past month, we’ve seen both Google Reader and GOOG-411 graduate from Google Labs.  With Google Transit following close behind, it’s hard not to detect a trend.  This may just be a matter of re-labeling – no dramatic changes or upgrades accompanied any of the moves – but it still looks like evidence of Google growing up.

It’s almost enough to make you wonder if the “beta” label will get dropped off Gmail at some point.

I’ll let you count the languages for yourself; Google sort of goes overboard, in my opinion, by listing “English (UK),” but “Chinese (Traditional and Simplified)” probably could have been classified as two separate tongues.  Anyway, the other languages involved are German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and French.

As for the Google Labs development, Kevin Systrom, a product marketing manager, admits on the Official Google Blog, “It’s a small textual change, but we believe it solidifies our commitment to make reading blogs and news sites easier than ever.”

Also, the Official Google Reader Blog produced a strange sort of breakup letter to announce the adjustment . . .  I’m not at all sure what to make of it.

In any event, these occurrences come not long after Google Reader (finally) gained a search function, and, following a leaked presentation, there’s been a lot of discussion about what else may be in store for the software.

The company was profiled in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article, and they’re doing some interesting things (aside from embracing Calvinball, that is).  One project, dubbed GoodTree, is a center for Web, image, and news searches, among other things, and has the motto “Internet for Good” beneath its logo.

Remind you of those folks in Mountain View?

It should – in an older article SFC piece, James Currier, Ooga’s founder, said  “Google is sucking the oxygen out of the system” in reference to the company’s practice of hiring the best people available.  He then added, “You can’t blame them, though.  If I were them, I’d be doing the same thing.”

As for what Currier’s doing now, well . . . it’s hard to say.  Jessica Guyn states that Ooga, which is a “13-employee San Francisco startup,” “currently has five stealth projects under development.”

There’s no breaking news here in respect to those – sorry if you’ve read this far looking for some – but Ooga Labs is definitely a company that bears watching.  As do, by the way, all of the old Calvin and Hobbes comics.

I used to work for a major telco (Verizon), and we had a number of researchers working on various voice recognition systems. I’ve also tinkered a bit with applications using text-to-speech voice synthesis software such as the AT&T Labs Text-to-Speech software, so I’m familiar with some of the issues that are commonly associated with these types of systems.

I was curious about whether Google’s clever engineers had perhaps improved upon some of the issues involved with having software recognize spoken words, and I also wondered how the quality was of their voice-synthesis.

I’ve seen lots of problems with such systems. Back when I worked for Verizon, many of our larger facilities had automated phone directories so that you could call into a central number, state the name of the individual you were seeking, and the system could automatically connect you. For simple names and straightforward caller voices, these systems worked pretty well. But, I witnessed a number of occasions when it worked frustratingly. For instance, one of the Russian-American technical directors I worked with retained a heavy accent from his home country, and the voice-recognition system constantly misunderstood him, despite the fact that the systems supposedly were built with heuristics so that they were supposed to auto-correct and improve over time. Didn’t happen.

Further, while I have no real accent at all, times when I would try to reach someone with an unusual name such as a Chinese coworker were equally frustrating. It wouldn’t matter if I used a Chinese pronunciation, nor American phonetic pronunciation — for some names the system simply wouldn’t work.

I’m also very sympathetic to disabled people for whom automated systems often offer the greatest hope for improved quality-of-life, but also often produce the greatest let-downs. My father, a dynamic and clever scientist in his heyday was eventually beaten down some by various diseases, including a stroke late in his life. The stroke took away most of the use of the left side of his body — arm and leg, particularly. After he had retired, he enjoyed using his computers a lot, but the loss of the use of one of his hands made every task far more time-consuming. His solution for this was the purchase of some voice-synthesis software, but the functionality was never all that great because his speech had been slurred some by the stroke. So, he often had to repeat commands, and correct stuff with his good hand. When he called into company service centers, the situation always seemed a bit torturous to me as well. His attempts to vocally navigate call trees were often error-prone, resulting in an even more frustrating process than the usual, never-ending maze of call trees.

Good programming is often about handling of all the exception cases and extremes that may impact any given system. Speech and understandability are complex problems, and they’re areas where fuzzy logic and adjusting recognition template tolerances may never work perfectly for all people (until or if we also can match up AI to the problem). Even so, the criteria of “how well does it function for extreme cases” should be applied to assess the quality of the system, and one would hope that it wouldn’t be easy to find places where the system fails.

To do this quick assessment, I first performed searches for stuff in Google Maps to see what results they have in their database. Google Voice Local Search is basically a voice recognition and voice synthesis interface that have been put on top of their regular Google Maps search engine and results. So, I wanted to compare the vocal search results with the browser search results.

To phone into 1-800-GOOG-411 (ignore the promotion-hyped prestige number and just use: 1-800-466-4411), I used Skype, which is a voice-over-IP internet phone service, and I loaded an extra piece of companion software, Pamela, to record the call. I was a bit nervous about this, because Skype calls can sometimes make one sound like they’re speaking from the inside of a tin can, but my connection’s sound quality seemed to be excellent. Pamela didn’t seem to start recording until the call was already underway, so the first thing you’ll hear is me stating the location for the search.

Here’s the results of my test calls into GOOG-411:

1. I called in and started out with a simple search combination. I specified the locality of Bryan, Texas. I then searched for “Plumbers”. Here’s the Google Map of Plumbers in Bryan. Heres the MP3 of my Voice Local Search. This was a good user experience. The service understood my verbal request, provided back the same search results as the browser-based Map Search, and communicated it out to me audibly in really very smooth voice synthesis.

2. Now I would challenge the system with a difficult query — one with a potentially hard-to-recognize city name, and then a challenging business name: Watanabe Yasuo (a florist) in Waipahu, Hawaii. I know from experience that Hawaii has some of the most unusual place names in the entire US, and proper names of Hawaiian natives and foreign immigrants make Hawaii a hotbed of cultural melting pots. Here’s the Google Map result for Watanabe Yasuo in Waipahu. Here’s the audio of my Voice Local Search for Watanabe Yasuo.

This was a bad user experience. Gratifyingly, it found Waipahu just fine — perhaps including the name of the state, Hawaii, helped in this respect. But it just couldn’t find Watanabe Yasuo. After repeating that name, I then reduced it down to just one term, Watanabe, and I tried to pronounce it as a midwestern American might – phonetically. Still no-go. Even more frustratingly, the service then said “Sorry we must have a bad connection – just call back and we can try this again. Good-bye!” It hung up on me! The connection wasn’t the problem, and it’s very frustrating to have it hang up on you like that.

3. I tried calling back and still couldn’t get it to recognize “Watanabe”. (MP3) I then used their option for typing just the first name in – which irritatingly and strangely didn’t locate it, either. I then searched for just “Florists in Waipahu“. This time it found Watanabe Yasuo as result number five. Amusingly, the voice synthesis pronounced the name pretty much the same way that I originally did. I can see this bemusing users, since they might assume that if it can pronounce the name correctly, it should be able to understand the name when pronounced the same way. Of course, the speech-recognition and voice-synthesis systems are separate, so this sort of scenario could occur frequently.

So, how did Google do on my limited test? Not very well over all. I can tell that they worked on the voice synthesis quite a bit — they’ve smoothed it out to pronounce names, addresses, and phone numbers really nicely, so I can tell they worked on fine-tuning the synthesis quite a bit. Just based upon this limited test, though, I can expect that it would be very easy to force the system to fail on recognizing place names and types of businesses or business names. I don’t have an unusual accent, so it’s disappointing that the system didn’t understand my request for “Watanabe”, even though it is an unusual name. If it fails on my voice so easily, imagine how it will work for people who have accents, slurred voices or lisps, or people who tend to speak very slowly.

This experiment could seem like a cheap shot on my part, since voice recognition is such a complex matter to accomplish. But, there’s always some high expectations when Google deploys something out, even if it is in beta release. I haven’t performed a comparison here with other services that provide automated 411 services, either, but I don’t feel that’s all that necessary, since I’ve seen a number of those services “in the wild” over time, and the GOOG-411 version isn’t remarkably better as far as I can see.

I like a lot of Google’s new services that they’ve rolled out — I’m using the Calendar daily, and I like Google Trends, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Maps, and the original Google Analytics. But, I have to give the 411 service a “C” or “D” grade. Why deploy something out, even in beta format, if you can’t do something that significantly improves upon the similar services already out there? This is a free service with no ads (so far), so perhaps the one benefit to users is that it’s a 1-800, toll-free directory assistance service. Unfortunately, the service is likely to be a disappointment for people with non-average-American voices.

Local Search is hard enough in many ways, and adding on the voice-recognition makes it even harder to produce good-quality results. So, I am sympathetic to the limitation of current technology.

With all of Google’s great work in information retrieval, I was disappointed with this – it doesn’t stand out from the crowd, and one suspects some of the other, older players out there may be doing a better job. There’s quite a bit of research going on in audio recognition and search — since 9-11, I’m aware of quite a lot of work going on through the CIA and other US government groups to automatically convert the audio streams of various “chatter” sources to text, which can then be searched upon for various suspicious word sequences. In this way, automated systems can be used to monitor input from countless wireless phone calls and landline calls, and a log of those matching on suspicious word sequences can be brought to the attention of human reviewers to try to identify potential terroristic activity. With so much funding support of this sort of research, one would hope that new vocal search services would really wow us with their quality.

I’d challenge Google to user-test this with more of the exception cases and extreme cases in order to get it functioning better for those with accents and voice problems. Disabled people need services like this to work dependably more than any other user group. Google has quite a lot of employees who are foreign-born and have accents, so they already have user groups that they could use as test subjects.

If you’re reading this and you have an accent, please try using Google Vocal Local Search, and then write about your experience on the Goog411 Group so that they can improve the service. They’ve also very generously provided their email address so that you can also contact them to relate your experiences.

I’d also be interested in hearing about other users’ experiences with this service, so be sure to tell us about it in the comments section of this post!

Comments

Parparita took a moment to explain his creation’s background and future. “Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary,” he wrote. “I can’t really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.”

“Reader is in Google Labs,” Parparita noted, “and that puts it in the throw it against the wall and see what sticks’ product family . . . . To stretch this metaphor further, if the spaghetti starts to slide off, engineers (and UI designers, and product managers, and others) will study the problem and figure out how to increase its coefficient of friction.”

Parparita’s spaghetti has already passed a few taste tests, and earned the (informal) endorsement of Garett Rogers. “I’m happy he decided to experiment by giving Gmail tighter integration with Reader, as it’s something I have often wished existed,” Rogers posted in the Googling Google blog.

Jason Clarke of the Download Squad also approved of the Greasemonkey script, writing, “It’s very nice to have Google Reader content just a click away in my Gmail. Hopefully this becomes a full-blown integration sooner rather than later.”

The original announcement on persistent.info has already attracted forty-nine responses, most of which are extremely positive. Because of them, an official integration may well be on the way – Parparita wrote that “it’s been great to get direct, concrete indicators for what we should work on next.”

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Now you can pan around the World and toggle on street maps, DRGs, DOQs, etc… all within the Google map environment. The app is fairly simple yet effective.

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com

ZDNet reported how Flake will head the Live Labs effort. Members of Microsoft Research and MSN will be part of Live Labs as Microsoft seeks to speed up the company’s glacial development cycles.

In the article, Flake acknowledged what most observers already knew about Microsoft:

The effort looks like an attempt to match some of Google’s success with its Google Labs. Projects like Gmail got their start in Google Labs, and for a time delivered new products to the public at a dizzying pace. Microsoft also plans a complementary Search Labs component to focus on improving search

He acknowledged the perception that Live Labs would compete with Google Labs as well as Yahoo’s research efforts:

Microsoft announced its Windows Live and Office Live projects in November 2005. Windows Live debuted online as Live.com; Later, Microsoft folded its Virtual Earth and Maps & Directions projects into Windows Live Local, which included “bird’s eye imagery” of a dozen US cities.

Office Live should launch early in 2006. The company sent emails to those on its beta test signup list to remind them about Office Live and detailed the services it plans to make available on a subscription basis to small businesses that end up participating in the full release.

Flake also coined a new buzzword in the report to replace the oft-repeated Web 2.0 reference to new technology based around the concept of web services:

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Yahoo Yields Search Game To Google

Unfortunately for Yahoo and the search world, Google has been playing the role of Roger Federer, and been just as dominant. Yahoo’s CFO Susan Decker told Bloomberg in an interview that the Sunnyvale-based company would be retiring from the match:

"We don’t think it’s reasonable to assume we’re going to gain a lot of share from Google….It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."

Yahoo holds about 24 percent of the US search market share, well behind Google but solidly ahead of Microsoft, AOL, and Ask Jeeves. Search expert Danny Sullivan disagreed with Decker’s comments on settling for second place:

"It kind of makes you wonder about how serious they are about search," said Danny Sullivan, editor of London-based SearchEngineWatch.com, which tracks the search industry. "It really ought to be their goal" to be No. 1, he said. "Whether it’s realistic or not."

Instead of frantically trying to catch up to Google or just erode some of its market share, Yahoo will work on improving its contextual advertising relevance instead. During Yahoo’s earnings announcement, Decker alluded to a gradual rollout of improvements to its Overture advertising system throughout 2006.

Ad relevance rather than search itself appears to be the focus of newly minted research labs in Spain and Chile, then. Yahoo just announced it would open those labs, and has added several notable search scientists to Yahoo Research in recent months.