Yahoo Introduces Mobile Search
Yahoo custs deal with V-Lingo and rolls out Mobile Voice Search.
Yahoo became the first major search engine to let people search the Web by talking to a mobile device.
Marco Boerries, an executive vice president, said technology from vlingo, a start-up based in Cambridge, Mass., would allow people who have BlackBerry Curves, Pearls or the 8800 series to scour the Web with their voice, using Yahoo's mobile search engine, known as oneSearch. Yahoo is working to make the service available on other mobile devices and overseas.
"We are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones," Boerries said during a keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas.
Dave Grannon, chief executive of vlingo, said the service can handle any spoken query. It is also built to adapt to a person's voice and to improve over time, he said.
Competitive products, such as the voice search in Microsoft's Live Search for mobile, can only handle queries for specific local information, such as directions to a local pizza parlor.
ChaCha, an Indiana company, lets people search the Internet from any phone by calling 1-800-2-ChaCha (1-800-224-2242). ChaCha sends a text message in response. Unlike vlingo, ChaCha employs people to listen to and answer the queries.
Scott Jones, chief executive of ChaCha, said vlingo's speech recognition is the best he has seen on a cell phone - though still not as good as human recognition.
Cory Pforzheimer, a spokesman for Yahoo, said the company looked at all of the Sunnyvale VOIP technology for doing voice recognition on cell phones before settling on vlingo. "We have many search and voice recognition experts at Yahoo and they were just blown away," he said. Pforzheimer said Yahoo's deal restricted vlingo from doing business with Yahoo's competitors, such as Google and Microsoft.
Yahoo led vlingo's new $20 million series B financing round, the companies announced Wednesday. Other investors included Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners.
To get the new Yahoo voice search software go to mobile.yahoo.com
