Yahoo unveils mobile search powered by Cambridge start-up vlingo
At a keynote speech at the wireless industry's tradeshow in Las Vegas today, Yahoo Inc.'s executive vice president of Connected Life, Marco Boerries outlined his vision of the future of mobile search, enabled in part by Cambridge start-up vlingo.
He demonstrated vlingo's voice-recognition technology, which initially will power Yahoo's oneSearch platform, by asking his 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 thier mobile phone," said Steve Boom, senior vice president of Connected Life for Yahoo, in a statement. Connected Life is Yahoo's mobile products division.
Yahoo led a $20 million investment into vlingo, a venture-backed start-up that provides voice-recognition technology for mobile devices. OneSearch is available on Blackberry mobile devices now, and will be rolled out to other products in the future.
"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.
(By Carolyn Johnson, Globe staff)
