San Francisco — Just earlier this week, we reported that Yahoo will discontinue development on its revamped mobile application for the Blackberry in favor of the iPhone, but very soon released an update to its iPhone app, offering another important resource to mobile searchers at their fingertips, and this time in the form of Yahoo’s Mobile 1.1 for iPhone and iPod Touch app, which now includes voice-recognition search capabilities to compete with Google’s iPhone app.
Yahoo’s mobile app enables iPhone users to speak their Yahoo queries, as well as integerating everything you need to keep connected with e-mail, social networks, news feeds, messenger, video, and other Web-based features to the iPhone into a single window.
Yahoo’s voice-recognition oneSearch is already operational on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian, but this is the first from Yahoo on Apple’s platform.
Yahoo’s oneSearch functions almost similar to Google’s iPhone app, so the option to select one or the other will now demonstrate your brand loyalty and which Web e-mail address is your favourite.
Once the search bar is visible in the app, users can click on the oneSearch button to activate voice controls, then a large gray button becomes visible prompting you to press a button and speak what you are looking for — and hope it understands British accents.
Unlike Google’s voice app, which by all means had permission to break Apple’s development rules, you cannot bring the phone to your ear to activate the voice prompt. With Yahoo’s app, users can also use their voice to add topics of interest. The voice control technology is powered by Vlingo.
Voice transcription also plays a vital role within the “interests” tab on Yahoo Mobile, where a user can utter a new topic after selecting “add anything.”
The upgrade comes in the shadow of Yahoo’s determination to catch-up with its rival Google, which released a voice-powered search app for the iPhone last year. Google’s app also has an advantage over Yahoo’s because it enables the user to activate the voice search by bringing the phone to the ear.
Nevertheless Yahoo shelved its all-in-one browser project in order to exclusively focus its efforts on the iPhone and the mobile Web browser experience, individual widgets from the project will be released to different phones over time, said a spokesman. It will also continue to support and improve the Yahoo Mobile Web site, to which any phone with a browser can gain access.
Although the new features will eventually arrive on an iPhone through an update, it is still being rolled out. So those who cannot hold their aspiration can go into the iTunes app store and download the free Yahoo app to get the update right away.
As Yahoo reorganizes under CEO Carol Bartz, it is unclear how big a role the mobile division will play in the company. Mobile search will continue to play a large role, and the company recently signed a pact to provide search for most of AT&T’s phones except for the iPhone, which has Google as the default search. The company may also try to woo developers with its Blueprint platform which enables content creators to write apps once and have them run on multiple platforms.
In addition to rolling out this Yahoo Mobile update, Yahoo has expanded support for oneSearch with voice to the BlackBerry Bold, Storm, Flip, and Curve 8900. It also pushed out an auto-locate feature to the Yahoo oneSearch shortcut on some Window Mobile devices, and has made that application available to phone users in 21 countries outside the U.S., including India, Canada, the U.K., and the Philippines.