Google continues to fine-tune its speech recognition technology, which is growing in popularity. Its English Voice Search system now uses 230 billion words from actual user queries, allowing it to better recognize phrases people are likely to say, the company says.

Google's voice search traffic has risen six-fold in the past year, an increase that speaks to the popularity of speech recognition on mobile devices. It will be interesting to see if desktop and laptop PC users show the same enthusiasm for voice input.

Google today also announced a new search feature called , as well as tools.

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