Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R): How Google Broke the Voice Search Transcription Trap

Google S2R: The Architectural Revolution Ending Voice Search’s “Text Transcription Trap” 【The Hook (10–30s Attraction)】 Did you shout “Munch’s The Scream” at your device, only for it to search for “screen painting”? Google says: It’s time to end the brittle tyranny of “Speech-to-Text” errors! 【TL;DR (3 Lines)】 The Fix: Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R) fundamentally changes voice search by mapping spoken queries directly to a semantic vector (embedding), bypassing the common ASR-induced cascade errors. The Tech: It employs a Dual-Encoder architecture, jointly training an audio encoder and a document encoder to ensure the query vector and the target document vector are “geometrically close” …