Yahoo! launched oneSearch with voice recognition system in India and Singapore. Henceforth, mobile users can speak out their search key word and oneSearch can show up the results based on just a voice input. The product has been developed after working on respective local Indian and Singaporean accents.

In India, people are still not as comfortable with the keys as they are with voice when it comes to mobile interactions, pointed out Prashant Mehta, vice president, head, Advertiser and Publisher group, International Emerging Markets, Yahoo!.

Yahoo! also announced the localized versions of Yahoo Go 3.0 (its flagship mobile offering) for India, Australia and SE Asia, along with new mobile widgets and a MTV Asia mobile widget for APAC.

With a user base of 300 million, India continues to be key to Yahoo!’s strategy as a market and barometer in the growing mobile space as reflected in today’s announcements.

“India is a key market for our growth. We are investing here across the board and would make further inroads with key partners. There is also emphasis on development of the next generation of products,” Mehta explained.

There are possibilities of incorporating vernacular additions like Hindi or Marathi ahead. To start with, the search product would work on BlackBerry devices like Pearl, Curve and the 8800 series. Work is on for extending it to Nokia devices.

Manish Dalal, senior director, Broadband and Mobile products, Yahoo! India in a conversation with CyberMedia News at CommunicAsia 2008 said that these products would rather incorporate intelligence in the same product than extending the voice-recognition input to other applications. So, there is less possibility of having a VR-based weather or cricket score update application from Yahoo Next.

“Nothing is more wide and deep in scope than the search engine. It’s the front-end. Why not, give intelligent output to a voice input in a search mode itself. That’s why we have worked on and would continue to making the VR search function as intelligent inherently as possible,” he said.

The search option is cluster-based and works in the indexing way so as to give answers first and web links later.

“It’s a learning engine and we will grow and improve as we learn from users, which is why a beta version is vital,” Dalal said.

Yahoo claims a 500 million space in the approximate one billion Internet user base with 250 million Yahoo Mail accounts, 42 million Flicker accounts and 100 million on Yahoo Messenger.

Source: CIOL