The lawsuit launched by Nuance against Yahoo! hints at the gravity surrounding speech-enabled search services. Spoken utterances and voice response are key to hands-free, mobile access to the sort of ‘rich local search’ services that can be delivered through a wide range of mobile devices, from the highly popular low-end or ‘free’ handset to sophisticated, geoenabled, full-featured handsets. Conversely, search service providers, like Yahoo!, want to use emerging audio search technologies to mine the ever-growing repository of spoken media ranging from Internet radio to blog-like Podcasts. Unless the current vendors can build a compelling business case, the search engines are poised to displace directory assistance vendors for on-demand 411-type services.

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