Android 1.1 was released this week and included a voice search application as part of the update. Like most parts of Android the speech recognition functionality has been abstracted into sub tasks that use intents to perform specific actions. You can now call an intent that will launch the speech recognizer “application” and return to your application a list of results. The Intent and a description of it’s results can be found in the Android source code in the android.speech package. This library is not officially supported by the Android SDK and it should not be used in any consumer facing applications. That said you should also make sure to include “” in your application’s manifest file so that the app cannot be installed on a phone that doesn’t have the 1.1 firmware on it.

Here is the code for launching a simple speech recognition intent:

Intent intent = new Intent("android.speech.action.RECOGNIZE_SPEECH");
startActivityForResult(intent, 0);

The intent launches the voice recognition activity which prompts the user to speak into the phone, your speech is then analyzed and a list of results is returned in a bundle to your activity.

Here is the code for extracting the results:

@Override
	protected void onActivityResult(int requestCode, int resultCode, Intent data) {
		...code for checking resultCode and data intent...
	ArrayList<String> results = data.getExtras().getStringArrayList("results");

	}

As you can see this makes it very easy to add a speech recognition element to an application, although I am not sure whether or not this functionality will be officially supported in a future version of the SDK.