At CTIA Wireless yesterday Yahoo Inc. announced a collaboration with speech start-up Vlingo in which Vlingo will provide the speech recognition to compliment Yahoo’s oneSearch search technology for mobile phone applications. Marco Boerries, EVP of Yahoo’s Connected life division; the one that focuses on mobile products, did a demo of the new Yahoo! oneSearch at CTIA, by asking the application where is the best play to play craps in Las Vegas.

It took a long time, but Intervoice has finally merged their enterprise and network platforms into one, both from a solutions and philosophy standpoint. That is one of the key takeaways that I got from having attended the Intervoice industry analyst event in DC this week. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal but it is when you consider that it completes a transition born out of a) moving to a software and services company from one that a decade ago was proprietary down to the board level, b) melding two very different businesses – service provider and enterprise, c) completing the integration of some big acquisitions – namely Brite, Edify, and Nuasis d) blending together contact center, self-service (IVR), messaging and notification onto the same platform.

We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing on Dimension Data. For whatever reason, prior to Cisco’s UC summit last fall I hadn’t paid much attention to Dimension Data, but since sitting in on that presentation, I’ve been keenly interested in what they do and their business model.