Google has said it sees voice search as a major opportunity for the company in building a presence on the mobile web.
The company's vice president of engineering made the comments during a wide-ranging discussion at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.
"We believe voice search is a new form of search and that it is core to our business," said Vic Gundotra.
SearchEngineLand editor Greg Sterling agreed: "If done right, it could be a valuable strategic feature for Google."
Mr Gundotra acknowledged to the audience that "voice recognition in the early days was a nice trick but not very usable".
There were early complaints that Google's offering could not understand accents other than American and that results were often garbled.
"Look how far we have come. I get the advantage of looking at daily voice queries coming in and it's amazing. It's working. It's reached a tipping point. It's growing and growing very, very fast and we are thrilled about it," said Mr Gundotra.
He declined to share figures about just how many queries the company deals with via voice search.
However, Mr Gundotra did say: "It's one of those technologies we think gets better with usage.
"We launched it on the iPhone and have seen a 15% jump in accuracy because, as more people use it, we collect more data and our accuracy gets better."
'Queen's English'
In 2002, Google Labs introduced a service that allowed users to search with a simple phone call. The company admitted it "wasn't very useful because the results were displayed on your computer and Google discontinued it".
Six years later, the search giant introduced an improved feature under the Google Mobile App for the iPhone
