Yahoo! debuts voice enabled mobile search
- Added:
- Apr 03, 2008
Yahoo! has updated its mobile search service ‘oneSearch’ with a number of new features, including a voice recognition function.
Yahoo! is partnering with vlingo, a leading speech-recognition company, to allow its mobile search service let users search by speaking into the receiver rather than typing.
The service is initially available in the US for select Blackberry devices including the 8800 series, Curve, and Pearl. Over the coming months, the product is expected to support additional devices and become available internationally.
The new Search Assist feature also uses predictive text completion. For instance, a consumer searching for information about “Hillary Clinton” can just type “hil” and search assist will instantly suggest “Hillary Clinton” along with “Perez Hilton,” ”Hillary Duff” and the other most common search terms containing those letters.
Search Assist also recommends more refined results than your initial query. For example, as you type in “Apple,” Search Assist may recommend links such as Apple iPhone, Apple iPod, or Apple stock price.
At launch, Search Assist is available for the iPhone and is expected to become available on additional AJAX-compatible devices over the coming months.
In addition, publishers can now integrate relevant content into the Yahoo! oneSearch results.
For example, whereas today’s search results for “Italian restaurants” includes information such as addresses and phone numbers, open results could also include information from restaurant booking companies displaying the number of available reservations.
Or, as another example, search results for “London” might provide transit schedules from public transit providers such as upcoming arrival and departure information.
oneSearch will also now be available on the idle screen of many phones.
Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!, said: “With the launch of Yahoo! oneSearch in 2007, we revolutionized mobile search by re-creating search specifically for the mobile phone, focusing on answers, not just Web links. In just over a year, we signed 29 partnerships with carriers across the globe, covering more than 600 million consumers under contract.”