I loved reading Tom Keating’s blog post about Google Android, and his clever snooping around IP addresses to figure out if an online demo was actually powered by something Google related. Tom received an e-mail with a URL which purports to be a demonstration of Android which uses ASR to take a question, and then answers it over the phone. Through his sleuthing, Tom figures out that the application is most likely powered by LignUp, and then goes on to ask about the possible relationships between LignUp and Google.

I’m a registered developer of LignUp, and although I can’t tell you about any relationship between LignUp and Google, I can tell you that the demo is well within the Lignup feature set, direction and common usage pattern. My bet is that the Google Android thing is a hoax, for many reasons, not least of which is the web page is obviously not Google. I know that there are many developers working on the online version of LignUp, and so this is probably just one of them goofing around.

If this is all true, I’m actually pretty impressed with LignUp’s apparent progress on ASR. I know it’s not publicly available yet, so I bet it’s not as tight as the rest of the feature set, but it would be an exciting addition to the product.