Google’s Voice Search, which launched on cellphones in 2008 and was added to the desktop in June, seems like such a simple proposition. You speak your query into your phone (or computer), and, ta-da, the system pops out an answer.

But teaching Google’s voice bot to understand what users are saying isn’t simple at all. And if you’re trying to get it to speak all the languages in the world, it’s even more complicated.

Enter Linne Ha (pictured, right), Google’s Voice Hunter. Her official title is “International Program Manager, Google Voice Search,” but Ha spends her days crisscrossing the globe, gathering the voice samples needed to train the voice bot, the way a lepidopterist might go hunting for rare butterflies.

Typically, a company would solve this problem by licensing samples from firms that specialize in assembling speech databases. But that wasn’t going to work for Google.

Many of the standard lexicons simply don’t include the kind of words people use in search queries. (And Google has found, interestingly enough, that the words people use in voice searches are pretty much the same as the ones they use in written ones.)

Plus, Google needed their bot to understand queries spoken in all the settings that someone might possibly use Voice Search (or voice input and Voice Actions, two other Android features that also use the acoustic models created using the samples). Traditional firms weren’t set up to handle those situations.