Earlier this year, Google announced a new feature for search – conduct a search with your voice in the Chrome browser.

To conduct a conversational search, you’d fire up Google Search; if you saw a little microphone symbol in the search box, you could click on it to activate the function, and then speak your search phrase in conversational English (or any of the other supported languages).

When I tried it in May, I thought it was a bold step by Google in making everything easier in how you interact with your computer for conducting a routine task like a search.

Google has now taken this to another level by doing away with the need to click anything – now, you just talk – via an extension for Chrome called Google Voice Hotword that works on Chrome versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll be able to do everything re your search just by speaking – without clicking anything. All you do is give the extension permission to use your microphone. You do that once only. And you can revoke permission any time you want to.

How easy is it to do a Google Voice search? Take a look:

At the moment, this cool feature works only on google.com not any other geographic search location. I tried it at google.co.uk – no, it didn’t work. And it works only in English for now.

There’s a little more information in Google’s concise announcement on Google+ with a simple video. And here’s another video, one I did earlier: just a straight search for a news story.

Saying “Ok Google” to initiate an action is similar to what you do with Google Glass to record a video, do a search, take a picture, ask a question, etc. With that device, you say “Ok Glass.”

I can see “Ok Google” becoming the default for interacting with Google, via whatever device. It’s much more to do with what you want to do rather than the device you’re using to do it.

And it’s very easy to get used to.

Related posts:

• Foundations for evolving relationships between people and machines
• Google conversational search is a bold leap forward