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[This post is by Mike LeBeau, the Tech Lead and architect behind Voice Actions. — Tim Bray]
We recently launched Voice Actions in the new Google Voice Search for Android — an awesome new way to search, control, and communicate on your phone faster than ever before, by using your voice.
One of these new Voice Actions lets users find and automatically play music. By speaking something like “listen to They Might Be Giants” into the new Voice Search, users can quickly find the music they want online and play it, using any number of different apps. (Pandora, Last.fm, Spotify, mSpot, and Rdio are among the first apps to support this.)
To do this, we leveraged a very common little piece of Android magic: a new Intent. If you develop a music app that supports open-ended music search, you can make it work with users speaking “listen to” Voice Actions simply by registering for the new intent we’ve defined. This new intent isn’t defined as a constant in the SDK yet, but we wanted to make sure music app developers had all the information needed to use it right away.
