Motorola Xoom: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. Controlling Your Xoom with Your Voice

Tired of tap-tap-tapping away on your Xoom? Would you prefer instead to talk to it and have it obey your commands? Just say it, and it’s done. Want to send an email, search the Internet, get directions to a city or street address, listen to music and more? Rather than having your fingers do the walking, have your voice do the talking, and you can do all that and more.

You do all this using an app built into your Xoom called Voice Action. It’s simple and straightforward, as you’ll see in this chapter. So save some wear and tear on your fingers and get talking.

Using the Magic of Voice Actions

Possibly the most amazing part of your Xoom’s amazing Voice Actions feature is this: The only thing you really need to know about it is how to talk. Your voice is its command.

Launch it in one of two ways:

• Tap the Voice icon to the right of the Google Search box.

• Run the Voice Search app from the App Menu.

Tip

The Voice icon shows up wherever the Google search box does, either when you’re visiting Google on the Web, or anywhere else you can search Google on your Xoom.

Another amazing thing about the Voice Actions feature is that it seamlessly uses two different speech technologies to do what you tell it to: voice recognition and speech-to-text. With voice recognition, it recognizes the action you want to take, and then accomplishes the action: “Send email” ...