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.
Vlingo may be a speech start up, but its founders are no strangers to either speech technology or mobility. Mike Phillips has been in speech for over 20 years, starting in research at Carnegie Mellon, then MIT, and then founding SpeechWorks (since acquired by Nuance) in 1994. Co-founder Dave Grannan most recently was at Nokia, but has spent most of his career in wireless and software companies.
The announcement and technology demonstration was yet another in a string of announcements we’ve seen this year using speech to enhance unified communications and mobility applications, but the announcement had even more impact because Yahoo also announced that it had made a $20M investment in Vlingo to boot. That shows both promise and respect for the industry.
The new product is available for selected Blackberry users right now, but will be rolled out to other devices in the US over the coming months. It can be downloaded at http://m.yahoo.com/voice. Although, when I tried that link it didn’t give me a chance, just said that it wasn’t available for my phone, before I even found a place to enter my phone type. My Blackberry took offense at that! I’ll try back later.