Date: 04-04-2008
Yahoo! has made history by becoming the first major search engine to introduce online search features enabled by voice commands. Yahoo! announced that version 2.0 of its oneSearch mobile search service will feature vlingo technology and will bring up direct links to results from sites such as Facebook and Yelp. The voice search feature is designed for a wide range of mobiles, including the iPhone. The feature is not bounded by grammar rules, and as Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Connected Life unit, said “This is really a sea change. This is not about simple Web links any more.” Scott Jones, chief executive of ChaCha, an Indiana company, reportedly said that “vlingo’s speech recognition is the best he has seen on a cell phone — though still not as good as human recognition.”
