Yahoo oneSearch with Voice, search the Web by Speaking

Yahoo on Wednesday became the first major search engine to let people search the Web by speaking to a mobile device. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch. Yahoo! oneSearch with voice is now available for BlackBerry Curves, Pearls and 8800 series phones. Yahoo is working to make the service available on other mobile devices and overseas.

“We are fundamentally changing the way consumers use the Internet on their mobile phones,” Yahoo’s Connected Life division vice president Marco Boerries said during a keynote at the CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas.

Dave Grannon, chief executive of vlingo, said the service can handle any spoken query. It is also built to adapt to a person’s voice and to improve over time, he said. Competitive products, such as the voice search in Microsoft’s Live Search for mobile, can only handle queries for specific local information, such as directions to a local pizza parlor. Yahoo is relying on voice technology it has exclusively licensed from Vlingo Corp, a two-year-old Cambridge, Massachusetts-based start-up. Yahoo also is leading a $20 million funding round in Vlingo with existing investors Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners. Starting on Wednesday, Blackberry users can download voice-enabled oneSearch at mobile.yahoo.com.