Vlingo aids Yahoo's speech recognition venture
Internet search giant Yahoo Inc.'s move into mobile search will be powered in part by Cambridge speech recognition start-up vlingo Corp., a collaboration that highlights the industry's interest in using talking, rather than triple-tapping, to navigate content on cellphones.
At a wireless industry trade show in Las Vegas yesterday, executive vice president of Yahoo's connected life division, Marco Boerries, demonstrated the combination of Yahoo's search technology and vlingo's speech recognition by asking a phone for the best place to play craps in Las Vegas.
"By integrating vlingo's innovative speech recognition technology into Yahoo oneSearch, we're taking mobile search to the next level and enabling consumers to get the answers they want by simply speaking into their mobile phone," Steve Boom, senior vice president of connected life, said in a statement. Connected life is a Yahoo division that focuses on mobile products.
Vlingo also said yesterday that Yahoo led a $20 million investment in the company. The oneSearch technology is available now to some BlackBerry users, and will be expanded in coming months.
Kevin Burden, director of mobile devices for ABI Research, said the deal was an encouraging sign that voice recognition, which has never taken off, is being taken seriously by the industry.
"The way we interact with computers hasn't really changed in 30 years - we're still looking at screens and keyboards, but at some point, change has to come . . . people are pretty much starved for a new way of interacting with technology," Burden said.
As the iPhone demonstrated to wireless carriers and equipment makers, for instance, the combination of flat-rate data plans and novel ways to input and navigate the content on a cellphone can change the way people use it.
A recent survey by iSuppli Corp. found that while cellphone users on the whole use their phones to talk 71.7 percent of the time, iPhone users spend just 46.5 percent of their time with the device calling others. They spend 12.1 percent of their time on the iPhone surfing the Web; on average, mobile phone users spend just 2.4 percent of their time with the device on the Internet.
"Every mobile phone that ships today has a great high-speed Internet connection, a bright color screen, good processing power, and good memory. We really believe the mobile Internet will be bigger than the [wired] Internet," said vlingo chief executive Dave Grannan. "The key thing holding it back from exploding is" discovering and using content. "Most people aren't going to type into a tiny little phone 'What's the best place to play craps,' but you'll certainly speak it."
The voice-enabled mobile services industry is still in its beginning stages, said Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. Vlingo will compete against major players such as Nuance Communications in Burlington and Microsoft Corp. But the announcement yesterday is evidence that speech is being taken seriously.
"There's definitely a belief among service providers and carriers that you have to have voice input for a number of popular applications," Miller said. They "think in a significant percentage of these interactions, voice is faster than multiple clicking and it will prove to be the most convenient way to get to the services."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
