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Mobile Voice Searching With Yahoo

Using your cell phone for searching can be a godsend when it's done right, and the prospect of using voice to search really intrigues me. It's not that it's incredibly hard to bring up a mobile version of Google, but, if done correctly, voice searches can be the lazy man's best friend.

With that said, I spent about a week playing around with Yahoo's oneSearch with voice service, which is part of the company suite of mobile applications. I have to admit, it's a neat little program.

Once you download it, you open the application, hold down the speak button and ask your query. I turned to the old standby -- "Where can I find pizza in San Francisco?" -- and after using the EV-DO connection to go back to Yahoo's servers, up popped multiple places to get some pizza pies.

OK, pizza's easy. My colleague asked the service to get the president's e-mail address, and up popped president@whitehouse.gov. The search took less than 15 seconds and I was happy with the accurate results. I did the almost-mandatory checking of the weather, and the forecast, and it came up in a speedy manner.

So, the service was pretty useful, but the Vlingo-powered voice recognition is far from perfect. For some reason, my girlfriend wanted to watch the new X-Files movie, and that devolved into an argument into how old David Duchovny was. I asked my question and was greeted with "How old is dave couch."

Sure, you can always use the keyboard to enter searches, and I did find it adapted to my speech after a while, but the voice recognition isn't completely there yet. (Duchovny's 48, by the way.)

But even more disappointing was the lack of GPS integration to find nearby locations. I was using a capable BlackBerry Pearl, and when I asked for "pizza," I was given a whole range of places in the city. You can rest assured that if I'm at the point where I'm audibly searching for pizza, I want it to be as close as possible.

That's not as big an issue if you're looking for a specific place or information, but true location-based searches would put this service over the top.

While I tested it on a Pearl, it's also available on the BlackBerry Curve and the 8800 series. Overall, it's a very useful service that needs to work out a few minor kinks.

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