Yahoo teams up with vlingo for voice search

voice search via mobile telephones

[Robert Charlton]

May require registration:
San Jose Mercury News [origin.mercurynews.com]

Yahoo teams up with vlingo for voice search

Yahoo today became the first major search engine to let people search the Web by talking to a mobile device....

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Pforzheimer said Yahoo's deal restricted vlingo from doing business with Yahoo's competitors, such as Google and Microsoft.

The anti-trust lawyers will have some fun with that comment.

[sem4u]

Cory Pforzheimer, a spokesman for Yahoo, said the Sunnyvale company looked at all the 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.

Sounds great if it works as well as Yahoo are saying. They should add it for computer users as well.

[sugarrae]

We were at CTIA (where they made the announcement) and also attended the press conference Yahoo held while there and one of my writers immediately downloaded a copy to play with and seemed pretty impressed by it. He is going to keep playing with it over the next few weeks to see how much it can "learn" but thus far, he seemed pretty satisfied with the first impression.

[a_chameleon]

Actually, Yahoo! is No. 2 for searching the Web w/ a major SE by voice..

[blogs.msdn.com...]

[whoisgregg]

became the first major search engine

Yahoo! is No. 2 for searching the Web w/ a major SE by voice

Google had Voice Search in Labs as early as 2002. Which turned into GOOG-411 (launched in Sept. 2007).

So between Google and MSN, it kind of looks like Yahoo! is actually *third* to achieve "voice searching." (And they had to buy it to get there.)

Of course, Yahoo!'s own press release on the subject [yhoo.client.shareholder.com] didn't make these claims, just an overzealous reporter.