Voice-enabled search has been integrated into the Yahoo’s oneSearch 2.0 on select Nokia Series 60 devices, and for few selected BlackBerry phones since this last April, but until now only a few of you could try it out.
Last week, Yahoo expanded its voice detection technologies into the oneSearch 2.0 home-page shortcut — available for playing aroung of Nokia Series 60 phones — and in the Yahoo! Go 3.0 files for select BlackBerry, Nokia Series 40, and Nokia Series 60 models, such as the BlackBerry Curve and high-end Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones mobile devices is currently only available for users in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada.
Those sticking with older versions of either of these apps will have to download them anew to get the chatty update.
Once the Yahoo oneSearch is installed on the Nokia Series 60 cell phone, one tap on the phone screen initiates a search. With the service operational, users can speak or type a search to find stock quotes, sports scores, movie times, restaurants and more. Yahoo said it also includes Search Assist, spelling suggestions and real-time related concepts for more refined search results.
Operating the voice search is simple — on BlackBerry, simply hold down on the green ‘talk’ button and speak your search term. OneSearch will start searching Yahoo’s database for answers as soon as you let go. Nokia owners can hit the pencil key to get going. Those without pencil keys will launch tier search by pressing the right shortcut key (labeled Y! OneSearch) and speaking or typing into the search box that appears.
Additionally, Yahoo Go 3.0 will integrate the voice search, and it can be downloaded onto select BlackBerry and Nokia S40 and S60 devices.
Although voice-recognition technology is constantly improving as a whole, many voice searches that is available using various applications have fallen flat. As for Yahoo oneSearch with voice in Go 3.0, the mobile app offers a user interface, personalized start page and services accessible through widgets. By integrating Yahoo oneSearch with voice into Yahoo Go 3.0, the search engine expands the convenience of voice search to new users.
These moves are just the latest in Yahoo’s multi-pronged strategy in the mobile space. On the mobile search side, the company trails Google by a significant margin, but Yahoo continues to make headway in that space with its oneSearch offerings, and it recently signed a deal to be the default search provider for most of AT&T’s cell phones.
Yahoo is also making a play for mobile developers with its Blueprint platform, and said it will enable content creators to write an application once and have it run on a variety of mobile operating systems. The company introduced the platform in September, and used it to build and optimize the oneConnect app for iPhone.
Yahoo will be competing with Google for developer mindshare as well as Google’s Android platform is weeks away from its first commercially available hardware.
Users can download the oneSearch 2.0 with a voice start-screen widget for select Nokia Series 60 phones by navigating to m.yahoo.com/shortcut from a PC or phone. The new version of Yahoo Go 3.0 (technically 3.0.4.6), which includes the voice-supporting Yahoo oneSearch widget, can be found for some Nokia and BlackBerry models at get.go.yahoo.com from a PC or the phone’s native browser.