[APP]Voice Search for Google Now!

[bigsupersquid]

DevDB xda thread downloads there.
VoiceSearchWrapper.apk, widget or long-press-search tool to use armv6 compatible Froyo Google Voice Search with current Google Now.

brief overview:
google now voice commands are cool.
they don't work on older chips (ours for example) because it's closed source and google mostly builds for new hardware these days.
"... has stopped responding."
boo, google.
this is a cheap (in code complexity)(free to you!) workaround using voice search off the market and this widget I kludged together.
Enjoy. Discussion thread here.

 

[bigsupersquid]

Working pretty good so far, good transition right into search, nice work bigsupersquid.

Seems great to me too, although I haven't had the chance to fully test it yet. Fix the navigation issue, and any other bugs that pop up (you got beta testers now), then put it on the play store, and you gladly have my dollar. Great work!

One thought, if you could figure out how to make it into an app as well, that'd be nice as it'd fit in folders.

It'd be easy to make it an app. It was hard finding enough info to make a no-container no-text non-animated single action widget instead of an app. It went through stages of being an app... I can make a 1.1 that is an app with a widget function. Sometime here...

The nav thing, I don't get. It'll work right with a physical address (including the one 'home' is set to,) or even something like the name of a business (I checked with Ruby T***day.) And it'll 'text' or 'call' some contacts but not others. My current version of Now won't do the 'Jessi is my wife' type relationship setting whether voiced or typed (plus it refuses to learn Jessi instead of Jesse.) I don't think it's the interface, except for the one thing that only works right when you push enter (navigate home.) The other stuff that Now isn't doing for me, it won't do regardless of the enter key.
Some of the easter eggs work from voice but most don't no matter how you put em in there.

It would be possible, with enough time, to hook the broken methods in libgoogle_recognizer_jni_l.so and even libgoogle_hotword_jni.so with xposed and make it all work behind the scenes, and then the 'enter' key thing wouldn't be an issue. The same gimmick would work with the other broken gapps too, the ones that haven't ever worked on armv6... again, I'd have to be independently wealthy or something to justify the time it'd take to do all that.

I really made the time for the widget because of a nasty little drive to a Cub Scout 'pinewood derby' model car race. Having voice controls on my phone would've saved 5-10 minutes (of everyone else stressed out being 'late' time) over my wife's bad data connection on Mirage before I gave up, pulled into a parking lot, and typed the address into Nav on my KitKit install. Immediate results. If I'd had this widget then it'd have saved me a icky little hassle. So I made it, again like the ROM, for personal use, and I'm sharing.
Thanks to you guys for bringing it up, or I'd not have realized Now voice controls were there or so useful.

I'll not be charging for the wrapper widget or app at any point because it depends on Voice Search, which means Google could officially break my app by pulling Voice Search off of Play.
Plus it's a sloppily-coded little piece of work. And I wanted a free, plug-and-play, solution when I started searching for this after you all brought it up. Do unto others...

If you wanna pay for it, I still take donations.

 

[bigsupersquid]

sideloading the Search app from Androidpolice instead of the one from pa_gapps fixes the "navigate home" glitch. go figure.