Google Now and Google Search are pretty amazing pieces of technology, you ask a question and with Now, it’s often already answered with cards already in your feed, or you hit the voice search and an answer is almost instantly there, but it’s personalised to you, and we all know kids like to emulate their parents and thats where Kids Voice Search from Platinum Apps comes in.
With Kids Voice Search, you can fill in some pre-determined information about your child and your offspring can then interact with the phone, just like mum or dad do with Google Search and have it return beautifully rendered Google Now type cards with information relevant to the child.
As well as the information you reference in the setup, there’s also questions related to dates, which can be a pretty nifty feature even for mum and dad to reference at times. There’s a list of questions you can ask included in the Google Play description and suggestions are available at anytime in the listening screen by hitting ‘Show More Examples’ on the listening screen
Kids Voice Search is free, but is limited to only one child and 10 searches per day. You also have limits on the themes available – Holo Light and Dark are free, but Boys, Girls and Neutral themes are only available in the paid upgrade.
Upgrading is as simple as using the In-App Purchase system to pay $1.99, this upgrade also allows you to add Bedtime reminders. As part of its introduction, Platinum Apps are doing a bit of charity with their launch, promising to donate 5% of all profits from the sale of Kids Voice Search during December to ‘Sids and Kids‘, a very worthy cause.
It’s a pretty well designed App, there’s some hiccups I found, such as my sons name is a slightly different spelling to the one in Google Voice Recognition which caused issues till I changed the spelling in the setup to get around this and some fields in the setup are mandatory which probably could be left blank – Friends Names, Nickname, but David Stallard from Platinum Apps has advised that some of these issues will be fixed in the next update.
There’s definitely more coming for Kids Voice Search with new features still being worked on, but at this stage it’s a pretty good start. The development team is keen for feedback and quite responsive, so if you give the App a go and find an issue, hit the ‘Send Feedback’ option from the settings menu and David and the team will attempt to address the issues in upcoming updates.
Thanks for the write-up Daniel. If anyone has any questions about the app, feel free to comment below and I’d be happy to answer them. All feedback is welcome.