Android's voice capabilities have always impressed me, giving me the ability to speak to my phone instead of spending time typing. Raising the bar a bit, Google introduced us tonight to live speech-to-text, making message dictation faster and more streamlined than ever.

Android's new speech-to-text functionality happens completely live, as we saw in tonight's demo. As soon as you start talking, your phone begins typing. It will even wait for you if you take a pause, and add emoticons and punctuation per your request.

What's more, this feature can be used in just about any app, using the microphone key on Ice Cream Sandwich's new keyboard.

While it isn't a huge departure from Android's previous speech-to-text functionality, it certainly speeds up the experience, and makes dictating messages and commands that much easier.