April 7, 2008 at 4:07 am · Authored by Julia · Filed under Mobile Applications

Bored with text input for mobile search? Yahoo has taken the wraps off voice enabled search for its oneSearch product for the BlackBerry users in the US, with more devices and countries coming soon. The base of the service is Vlingo’s speech recognition, which grabs the spoken search terms and enters them into oneSearch.

Yahoo is obviously rather fond of this technology - it’s also announced that it’s invested in Vlingo as part of a $20 million series B funding round for the company. Vlingo said it will put the money towards expansion and R&D.

Voice is, let’s face it, still the killer app for mobiles so it’s actually surprising there aren’t more people talking up voice-enabled search, especially given the push for mobility in emerging markets where literacy rates may be low. Does anyone know what Google’s up in this area?