Yahoo
has integrated a voice-search capability into its Yahoo Mobile for iPhone App, allowing
users to search by speech for everything from restaurant listings to movie
times.
The voice search feature can be activated by pressing the "Press
+ Speak" bar on the App’s screen. A red bar will appear with the words, "Listening…Tap
when done." Once tapped, the button then turns blue as the system digests the query,
and then produces a result.
Yahoo
originally announced at 2009 CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas that it would be
debuting a Yahoo Mobile Application for Apple’s iPhone in eight countries. The
company has been moving aggressively into the mobile-device space, with Yahoo
Mobile for the Web now available on more than 300 handheld devices with HTML-enabled
browsers.
In addition to oneSearch, the app also offers one-click
access to Yahoo Messenger, Address Book and Calendar, and formats Yahoo’s
various Web properties for easier iPhone reading and interaction.
Google
has already entered the voice-activated mobile space with the Google Mobile App
for BlackBerry, released in March 2009, which allows users to search using
their voices in conjunction with Google’s My Location application.
Yahoo has been busy streamlining its organization to better
compete with Google, Microsoft and other competitors in the search space. CEO
Carol Bartz has been publicly ruthless in cutting properties; in April 2009,
GeoCities, the Web page creation service that Yahoo purchased for $3.6 billion in
1999, found itself on the chopping block.
However,
Bartz also announced in an April 21 earnings call that mobile, along with
the Yahoo homepage, sports, news, finance, entertainment, mail and search, was
one of "those products that generate the majority of our traffic and
corresponding economic value."
Yahoo
came in second in the U.S. core search market in April 2009, with 20.4
percent share, versus rival Google’s 64.5 percent.
Enterprise Mobility News & Reviews 
