Voice access coming to Live Search for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry
It seemed analysts were the last to realize that Yahoo was out front and pulling away with its Go mobile service. So Google and Microsoft have been racing to catch up, and now Microsoft is preparing to leverage its investment in voice to attain an edge.
When Microsoft acquired Tellme Networks just over a year ago, it was with the intent of bringing a more intelligently behaving voice to automated answering systems, including the company's own communications servers. Now we're learning that Microsoft intends to get even more mileage out of the deal by integrating some aspects of voice recognition and response not just into services for Windows Mobile, but in a new Live Search system for BlackBerry as well.
As Entertainment and Devices Division President Robbie Bach demonstrated this morning during a keynote address at the CTIA Wireless convention in Las Vegas, Live Search for Mobile is moving away from trying to duplicate the Web experience in a mobile form, and toward giving mobile users a way to get around. They want to know what's where, what's nearby, and how to get there. A lot of that information is not just geographical in nature, but also verbal. So it's working to attach voice input and output to its service, in addition to its database of landmarks, and traffic information provided by Navteq.
With GPS becoming a feature of more and more smartphones, the result could put Microsoft right up against TomTom and Garmin, leveraging connectivity and features that stand-alone GPSes can't muster.
Already, Microsoft has been assembling its Live Search for BlackBerry, which so far offers a few welcome advantages over a similar trial by Google -- most notably, Microsoft's system is better laid out and easier to manage. But it didn't start out that way, as Windows Mobile Marketing Director Phil Holden openly admitted on his blog last October.
"Well, we did have a beta for the Blackberry, but to be fair it pretty much sucked," Holden wrote then. "It was written in Java and didn't work well with the Blackberry device so after a bunch of appropriate feedback the team realized it wasn't what we wanted so started again. This time its written with the public Blackberry API's and looks and feels like a true Blackberry app. It doesn't yet support voice input, gas prices and hours of operation but everything else that the Windows Mobile version has pretty much works like it should including traffic info and such."
The current beta of Live Search for BlackBerry is available for download via mobile browser at wls.live.com. Holden stated this morning that the update for this non-Windows Mobile service with voice added, will be unveiled sometime this spring.