We met with Vlingo yesterday. The company is previewing some new functionality and we had an interesting and wide-ranging discussion about the product and strategy. My question is: why isn't Vlingo investor Yahoo! leveraging the heck out of it? There was some initial fanfare about voice search on Yahoo! Mobile but since then there's been little or nothing.

I think that Yahoo! should aggressively integrate Vlingo into its mobile app as a discovery tool for all types of content and not just Web search. It should also build a mobile version of Yahoo! Answers and think about Vlingo as a front end to that experience. 

Alternatively our friends in Finland (Nokia) might consider buying a company like Vlingo and integrating it as a core component of its handsets — for smartphones and not-so-smart phones. 

Voice will continue to improve as a tool for a broad array of uses on the handset. Apple obviously bought Siri, which is not about voice search per se, but about semantic understanding of voice queries and matching with transactional services. And Google continues to invest in voice and see it as a differentiator. 

Microsoft of course had formidable voice assets but has not fully exploited or marketed them. Perhaps with the release of Windows (Mobile) 7 handsets we'll see a more prominent role for voice on the device. 

But Yahoo!'s got to get into the game more here. 

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile search, voice search