The meltdown may have knocked Google's stock down to the $300 mark, but that hasn't stopped the company from rolling out killer apps. Today, it's Google Voice, a new service for the iPhone that employs voice-recognition technology to let you speak search queries directly into your phone. Say you've just finished coveting your neighbor's ox, and you feel just rotten about it. Just pop open the iPhone, hit the Voice app, and ask, "Where's the nearest Catholic church?" Google will use your GPS function to find your location and pull up a list of local churches. Within minutes, you can be telling Father O'Flannery all of your dirty, dirty secrets.

As the New York Times points out, Google isn't the first company to deploy voice-recognition technology; customer service centers around the world use it for limited responses. And while Google has some of the best voice-recognition experts working in London, New York, and the GooglePlex, the technology is still rudimentary, and many search queries will offering gibberish in response. Still, this is a damn neat trick. The software employs the iPhone's accelerometer, which determines the phone's position in space, to know automatically when you've put the phone to your ear, at which point it goes into "listen" mode. Tracking your position via GPS technology will enable Google to charge higher ad rates for companies closest to you. Really, the whole shebang is a quantum leap.

So why, asks Clint Boulton at Google Watch, would Google let Apple have the first crack at it? Starting today, users can download the service for free on Apple's iPhones App Store. Yes, Google's strategy of leveraging its ubiquity to sell ads has served it all too well, but as Boulton says, "[W]ouldn't you think there comes a point when Google would be a little selfish and keep such a crown jewel as voice search for its own Android mobile platform? Such a move would surely boost sales of the T-Mobile G1."