AT A PRESS DEMO yesterday, Nuance showed how its app Open Voice Search is going to prove an extremely powerful weapon in mobile operators' battle against Google.

Why? Because operators can dictate that a special 'Talk' button is added to their handsets by the hardware vendors. Google has to rely on such a hardware change filtering onto Android handsets.

To 'Open' search, all the user has to do is hold the Talk button down and ask the question.

Such as, "Who won the world cup in 1966?" Impressively, using a boring old Samsung handset – not a smartphone – the answer quickly showed up onscreen in the demo.

So Open Search will will be extremely popular with pub quiz cheats, who will no longer have to hide in the loo while they key in the question.

The handset in question had gone online (using GPRS not even 3G) and Nuance's servers had recognised the speech. The servers handed the query over to a "big search partner" and then returned the answer to the handset in next to no time.

Presumably with 3G, search results will be much faster. Nuance's Mike Wehrs won't say which mobile operator would offer this first but the INQ would have a punt on US operator, Sprint.

Wehrs wouldn't say who the search partner actually was but the INQ believes it was definitely not Google.

It's already possible to utilise a version of Open voice search on the Samsung Instinct handset. Called Live Search, it's currently employed by Sprint for location based service. But it uses Nuance technology.

As Wehrs says, the main obstacle lies in persuading the ordinary handset owner that speech recognition really does work. Once they've seen a demo, they'll be convinced, though. µ