VentureBeat

Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass, speech recognition company, has just launched an awesome voice-powered interface for Blackberry smartphones.

In a recent post about speech-to-SMS provider Yap, we posited that the ultimate mobile interface would let us navigate a phone using a combination of voice and manual input. Yap’s goal was to get there eventually. But Vlingo, which launches such an application today, has left Yap — and even Microsoft’s heavyweight TellMe — choking on dust.

While voice-activated search and directory services have been around for a while — TellMe launched its version last year and the voice-recognition giant, Nuance, has one, as well — Vlingo combines these handy search features with the ability to call and dictate texts or e-mails to anyone in your address book and open applications like your calendar or map.

When I watched the video demonstrating what Vlingo could do (see below), I felt the first pang of phone-related envy to hit me since I defected from Blackberry to iPhone all those long months ago.

Vligno recently raised a $20 million round of funding led by none other than Yahoo, who had previously tapped Vlingo to power its voice-activated oneSearch application. First round investors Charles River Ventures and Sigma Partners participated, as well. All things considered, this investment may represent Yahoo’s single best move over the last few months — though admittedly, that’s not saying much.

Perhaps threatened by Vlingo’s agility and success, Nuance has filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against the young start-up, an all too typical move for big companies who can’t stand the competition.

Blackberry Pearl, Curve, and 8800 users can go here to download the new app, free of charge.

Tellme, the voice recognition company, has released more mobile search features, giving it a leg up on Google’s recently announced 411 service.

In addition to offering voice mobile search, which Tellme announced last month, it gives you a way of search for business listings using SMS texting or mobile Web. Tellme gives business listings, maps, phone numbers and driving directions. See images below.

If you use the voice service, which you do by calling 1-800-555-TELL and just saying “business search,” you can get the results visually. If you text, you send your request to TELLM (83556). Finally, you can download the mobile application at http://www.tellme.com (or http://m.tellme.com from your mobile phone.)

Of course, with Microsoft just announcing its acquisition of Tellme, this gives Microsoft a response to Google’s mobile 411 service, launched just last week. It also puts renewed pressure on independent players, such as 4Info.

Tim O’Reilly, the co-owner of the Web 2.0 conference who has also studied the world of data closely, says these efforts are more than they appear at the surface. It’s also about the data:

In short, I’m speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google’s own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player.

If I’m right about this, we see here another demonstration of my Web 2.0 principle that “data is the Intel Inside”, and that many of the future battles between industry giants will be around who owns data, rather than who controls software APIs. In that battle, we’ll see deployed all kinds of techniques to “harness collective intelligence” to build added value databases of various kinds.