How to search with the smartphone, without using the keyboard

If you can't search with the keyboard, with the smartphone you can use your voice or images

Search engines have changed our lives. If we have a doubt we go to one of the many search engines available, we enter our question and immediately we are given an answer that in most cases makes our doubts disappear. And with the arrival of smartphones, the number of daily searches has increased exponentially.

Most people now use their cell phone as if it were a computer: check e-mail, surf the Internet, use social networks and especially search through the engines. With the keyboard, it only takes a few seconds to make your request and receive a response from the search engine. Android smartphones even have an on-screen widget that allows you to interact directly with the Google Search service. But unfortunately, it is not always possible to use the smartphone keyboard to do a search.

For example, if we are driving, we can hardly do a search with the keyboard. In such cases, one's own voice can be a great helper. Also, text search does not always show the results we would like. And that's why we can use image search. Some applications allow you to take pictures of monuments and provide all the relevant information.

Voice Commands

To perform a voice search with your smartphone, just ask for the help of voice assistants. Artificial intelligence is ready to help the user at any time and uses the billions of information in the servers to improve the answers to people's questions. On Android smartphones you can ask Google Now and Google Assistant for help, while on iPhones there is Siri. To perform a voice search on Android you just say "Hey Google" and then ask the question, while on iPhone the magic words are "Hey Siri" followed by the question. Google Now takes you directly to the pages of the Mountain View search engine, while Siri uses the information in its database.

Audio search

To find out the name of a song, you often type the words of the chorus into search engines and hope that the request will be answered. But without having to use the keyboard, there is a much more effective alternative method of finding out the name of a song: Shazam. The application is now famous all over the world and recognizes a song by listening to just a few notes. The operation is extremely simple: you launch the application, start listening and when Shazam recognizes the song it shows it on the screen.

Monument images

When you are traveling you visit the main monuments of a city: churches, statues, squares and historical buildings. Unfortunately, you don't always know the language of the place and can't understand the information signs. But the smartphone can come to our aid to make a search without having to use the keyboard. How? Very simple, using some applications that take advantage of augmented reality and provide all the necessary information to users. The operation is very simple: just turn on the smartphone camera and frame a statue or a building and on the screen will appear a card with the main information.