Google Voice Commands, Rooted Android Phones and the UK

My word, what a title! So if you are in the UK and have a rooted Google Android phone (and if you don’t, why don’t you!?) – then you probably are quite disappointed with the new Google Voice Commands that have come out. Even if you don’t have a rooted phone – Google Voice Commands doesn’t give you all the features you’re excited about from the blog post.

First, let’s cover what to do with a rooted phone to make Google Voice Commands install. It’s not anybody’s fault other than Google’s in my opinion. They are shoe horning applications over system apps, and that doesn’t work very well for everyone. Cyanogen has promised to fix this – and in fact, in the latest nightly it behaves really well – but if you’re still having problems with installing from the Market – here goes:

Remember that this is doing stuff to the /system partition of your phone, and that is dangerous. Make sure you do a Nandroid backup before continuing! This was all tested on my Nexus One which was rooted using the ‘non-safe’ way (i.e. I don’t get the padlock when booting the phone). Also a quick thanks to the various forums out there – but in particular the official Cyanogen Forums for working out how to make Google Voice Commands work on CyanogenMod.

$ mkdir ~/tmpandroid
$ cd ~/tmpandroid
$ # Backup the old apps
$ adb pull /system/app/VoiceSearch.apk
$ adb pull /system/app/GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk
$ # Remount the base OS
$ adb remount
$ # Uninstall the built in stuff
$ adb shell rm -f /system/app/VoiceSearch.apk
$ adb shell pm uninstall com.google.android.voicesearch
$ adb shell rm -f /system/app/GoogleQuickSearchBox.apk
$ adb shell pm uninstall com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox
$ adb shell reboot

Now the phone will reboot and you’ll now be able to install from the Android Market just fine. The QR codes for Google Voice Commands and the associated widgets are below.

Now onto the other annoyance. You can’t use any of the commands if your language is set to anything other than English (US) – thankfully you don’t have to change the whole phone to achieve this – simply go to Settings -> Voice input & output -> Voice recognizer settings -> Language and select English (US). Personally I’ve had no problems with it recognising commands after this! Yay!

For what it’s worth – I also installed the latest nightly after performing the above steps and the search button behaved properly even though it didn’t in the previous nightly. So update to the latest nightly after doing this. Remember to always wipe cache/dalvik cache whenever installing a nightly for a smoother experience.

So there you have it, I hope this is helpful to somebody.

Voice Search

Search Widget