I wanted to find out if I can set a countdown timer on my phone, as a reminder for myself. This piqued my curiousity over whether this could be achieved using Voice Actions. Thus began the search. Strangely enough, I've had to dig rather deep in order to locate this little gem of an instruction.
It is basically a quick reference to the full list of commands you can say to give instructions to Google Voice Action. In fact, I find it strangely perturbing that all this functionality related to Voice Actions is not being widely publicised at all. Does Google not find it up to par yet, or perhaps they want to lie low for the time being, waiting to one-up Siri?
Indeed, if Voice Actions has been made available since Froyo, it has definitely been around for close to a year. Yet all they've provided is a one-page list of commands that this seemingly minor feature can do. There have been some rustling in the tall grass though. It seems that Google is toying with a universal translation feature similar to the babelfish from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Let's see if they'll eventually tie this in with Voice Actions.
By the way, the answer to my initial question turned out to be "Set alarm for 20 minutes from now". Anything else that asks about the weather I reckon can easily be dictated to the regular google search and something relevant will popup anyway, sans personality a la Siri.
[Update Nov 2]
After a brief discussion exploring the feature with my colleagues over lunch, one possibility is viable why their frontpage for Voice Actions does not feature everything. It would appear that Samsung does not implement the functionality for setting an alarm. And this was tested on their recent Galaxy S2.
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