Pretty big news yesterday out of the Googleplex:

The new Google Mobile App for iPhone makes it possible for you to do a Google web search using only your voice. Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the beep, and say what you’re looking for. That’s it. Just talk. Once the App is on, you don’t have to push any buttons to search. Check out the video below to watch engineer Mike LeBeau explain how this works.

After you speak your query, Google Mobile App will return search results formatted for your iPhone.

And if you’re doing a local search, there’s no need to specify where you are because Google Mobile App now has Search with My Location. Search for “movie showtimes” or “Mediterranean restaurant” and you’ll automatically see results based on your current location. For this to work, Location Services must be enabled on your iPhone and you have to opt-in to let Google Mobile App use your location.

There’s nothing really all that surprising about this. All the technology involved—voice recognition, location awareness, google search, advanced mobile Web—is fairly well established, albeit not universally adopted.

The important thing here is that this is a technology people will use, and not just alpha geeks. This is a useful tool that will make life on the ground easier for people trying to do everyday activities that have nothing in particular to do with technology like watching a movie or going to a restaurant.

Voice recognition and location awareness and everything else that technology watchers enthuse about become a lot more important when they start popping up as practical solutions to real problems. When looking back at the coming of the iPhone and other mobile devices with sophisticated application platforms (Google’s own Android, Nokia’s Symbian) in a few years, it might turn out that they were a turning point because they introduced so much technology into everyday activities.

They’ve done a lot to bring new technology out of the bubble and into the practical world. They’ve made that technology a real factor in how people live, work and behave.