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.

“Give me the latest weather report,” you say to your car. You listen, then direct it: “Turn the heat on to 70 degrees, and read me my stock quotes. Then play some Johnny Cash.” Sound futuristic? Yes, it does — even though it also feels like we should be there by now. That’s the testament to the difficulty of building voice-recognition systems.

However, that doesn’t mean innovative startups are giving up on that vision. VoiceBox, one of many companies presenting at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is perhaps closer than any other company to making voice recognition simple and accurate enough for everyday devices.

The difficulty with voice software is that people have different voices and accents, not to mention different ways to phrase a command. In the above example, you might have told the computer to “get,” “report,” or “tell me” the stock quotes — any of which would baffle current software.

To add to the challenge, asking for Johnny Cash after stock quotes would probably send today’s applications off on a hunt for a publicly traded company called “Johnny Cash.”

The approach VoiceBox takes focuses on the actual meaning of sentences. The team has done cognitive mapping and studied context to come up with proprietary algorithms that help computers figure out what you’re actually talking about, rather than just responding to one or two words — as with the frustrating automated phone menus that airlines, banks and other businesses have come to rely on.

That differs somewhat from companies like Microsoft’s Tellme and Google, which are likely building large databases of voice requests in order to progressively understand more, a sort of brute-force approach that relies in part on having volumes of data to refer their own algorithms back to.

In a demo of VoiceBox’s technology, we saw that it’s not yet perfect, or even close to perfect. However, the program was able to respond somewhat intelligently to CSO Victor Melfi as he ordered it to search out different songs and switch between tasks, which is the real sticking point for most other companies. (See the diagram below for a better idea of various tasks the software might have to tackle.)

Although voice has been touted in the past with no solid results, we may actually be close to seeing consumer applications, says Jackie Fein, an analyst covering emerging technologies at Gartner. “I’d say they or a company like them could get there in the next couple years,” she told us, adding that “It’s hard because it’s based on algorithmic improvements.” However, constant advances in processor speeds make it ever easier for calculation-intensive software like voice recognition to run on modern computers.

Once voice software does become accurate enough for large numbers of people to use easily, the way will be opened for any number of new applications to be developed by other startups. At the moment, VoiceBox is partnering with companies like IBM, Toyota and XM Satellite Radio to further develop its software.

Although VoiceBox has been developing its technology for about five years, the company has not yet taken funding. It is currently considering taking a round of venture capital.

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.

Here’s the latest action:

Dexter, the first robot that “walks like we do” — Entrepreneur Trevor Blackwell started a robot company in Mountain View, Calif. called Anybots a few years ago (we wrote about it). He built a robot called Dexter, and had real trouble getting him to walk. It’s tougher than you may think. Well, now Dexter has finally taken its first steps. Click on image and play video. Paul Graham’s account of the challenge is worth reading. Maybe Silicon Valley will compete with the Japanese after all (Honda’s robot, Asimo, has long lorded it over Dexter).

Technorati buys PersonalBee? — We’re hearing these rumors too. Valleywag has more. Technorati, a blog search engine, appears to be drifting, and its strategy here is unclear. But Personal Bee is a way to let people create personal news pages (see our original story on the site here). Reported purchase price: Six figures.

MySpace News, here it comes — Wired has the scoop about MySpace’s pending news site, which takes aim at Digg and other sites. However, it ditches the Digg concept of having a (cliquish) group of people submitting stories. Instead, it automatically collects news items from various news sites and blogs. MySpace users then discuss and rate the stories; the stories then change position on the page accordingly. This will be out in the second quarter.

Why you need lawyers, even early at a start-up — A tale of caution by Dave Winer, who sold his company to Verisign, only to get sued by someone because he hadn’t had the proper legal help, costing Winer $40,000 to defend himself.

Applied Materials builds biggest solar power installation — Google previously held the crown for biggest solar power installation on an existing corporate facility. Now Sunnyvale’s Applied Materials, just down the road, is building a 1.9 megawatt power system.

Green tech buzz continued — Notable story in the NYT about the Silicon Valley ecosytem evolving around green technologies. The “dot-watt” boom. Note also the story in the Mercury News, about how Foster City, Calif. start-up SolarCity is using the Web to round up neighbors interested in installing solar panels. If enough people sign up in a given area, the people get good discounts.

Microsoft confirms it will acquire Tellme — This is a big win for Benchmark Capital, which had the biggest stake in Tellme. Reports say Tellme was valued at about $800 million. Keliner Perkins had the second largest ownership, we’re told. Purchase announcement here.

Was Topix.net smart to pay $1M for Topix.com domain name? — Decide for yourself.

More advertising networks, anyone? — We don’t have enough.

Does all that gym peddling create usable energy? — No. It’s been bandied about by crackpots over the years: Generate electricity by tapping into all that energy people expend in the gym — on bikes, treadmills, weight-lifting. San Ramon, Calif. company 24 Hour Fitness invested $15,000 to test this. Turns out, if all 13 machines in one Hong Kong gym were in use ten hours a day every day, it would take 82 years to generate enough electricity worth the $15,000 investment. (Story here).

Microsoft is negotiating to buy Tellme Networks, a Mountain View, Calif. company that offers voice-recognition technology, and could sign something as early as this week, according to multiple news reports.

A Microsoft agreement to buy Tellme could value the company at up to $800 million, according to the WSJ.

From the WSJ:

The acquisition would fit Microsoft’s broader ambitions to build Web-based voice capabilities into its own products. Businesses and consumers have lately begun turning to the Internet to do things they once did using boxed software. Rivals such as Google Inc. have pressured Microsoft in some areas, such as email and word-processing, but Web-based voice services are still a relatively new field.

Microsoft could benefit from Tellme’s relationships with companies like FedEx Corp. and AT&T Inc., which use Tellme technology to offer voice-based phone services to their own customers. It could also build Tellme’s technology into other products — for instance, allowing users of handheld devices running on Windows Mobile software to search the Internet using voice commands.

We wrote about Tellme’s own mobile search offering. Tellme has raised at least $263 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital, Amerindo, Pantheon Ventures, Van Wagoner Capital Management, Barksdale Group and AT&T.

Tellme, a Mountain View, Calif. voice recognition company, has launched a notable mobile voice search feature.

On a Java-enabled phone, you hit the “talk” button, and say the name of city and state you are searching in. Then you say the name of the business (or ‘restaurants’ or ‘pizza’), and Tellme will return results on your phone, along with address, map and directions. It is free (though data charges apply according to your wireless plan).

You can do this by talking or typing. It covers the U.S., but it is a limited testing mode — meaning you have to sign up for it.

In Oct., Tellme signed a deal to offer 411 voice service via Cingular. Earlier last year, it said it was handling more than two billion directory calls a year, 74 percent of which are done without human intervention.

YouTube will contribute to valley’s allure — Two years ago, Google’s buzz, even before its IPO, gave entrepreneurs like Tribe’s founder Mark Pincus inspiration to dream up the social networking revolution. YouTube’s grand sale will also inspire a new wave of entrepreneurs, no doubt. The WSJ has a timely piece — written before YouTube’s sale was announced — about the entrepreneurs still coming to Silicon Valley.

There’s Matt Sanchez, co-founder of video company VideoEgg, who found he was spending more time in Silicon Valley than his home in New Haven, so packed a 12-foot U-Haul van with his servers and other junk, and moved out here. It has paid off. His team of four have since landed venture money, hired 22 more people, and signed lots of deals with Web sites, most of them within an hour’s drive. “There’s a unique set of resources in Silicon Valley that don’t exist in other places,” Sanchez, 25, told the Journal. And then there’s Metacafe, the Israeli video site, which just opened a Palo Alto office, and plans to hire 12 people by the end of the year.

How things change. We still remember the NYT trying to compare Silicon Valley with Detroit, back when it was fashionable to bash this place — and th was as recent as early 2005!

MySpace cleared — The suit filed by Brad Greenspan, the former chief executive of MySpace, against the popular social networking site, has been dismissed.

MeeVee’s logo sign — Meevee, the personal TV and entertainment guide company, is going to some lengths to build branding, putting up a large logo on its building and filming it, reminding some of the bubble era. It has raised $20 million in venture capital.

Microsoft offers mobile ads too –Google and Yahoo offer sponsored ads besides search results on your mobile phone. Now Microsoft has joined them, but offering click-to-call technology too — which is where you see an ad, click on it, and your phone dials the advertiser.

Google and Zoho gunning for online office software leadership — We’ll be moderating a panel tomorrow at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. We recently wrote about Zoho’s impressive product release schedule, apparently an effort to steal the thunder from Google. Zoho has now incorporated its array of software, including a new calendar and a new email feature, under one roof called Zoho Virtual Office. Meanwhile, Google does its own integration, linking up Writely and Spreadsheets with Docs & Spreadsheets.

Tellme Networks making headway in voice recognition — Speaking of the competition in mobile search, Tellme has been around a long time as a private company, based in Mountain View, and is getting a second wind. Back during the Internet bubble days, it was laying off workers. Now that voice recognition has become hot, it has just signed a deal with Cingular Wireless to offer a 411 information service that will allow Internet searches too. It is now handling more than two billion directory calls a year, 74 percent of which are done without human intervention, according to the NYT.

Netflix’s recommendation technology beat within a week — Netflix, the popular DVD site, offered a prize to anyone who beat its recommendation algorithm. Within a week, a team from WXYZConsulting.com in Los Gatos beat Netflix. The team is led by data mining engineering professor named Yi Zhang, of UC Santa Cruz (pictured here).

Sequoia Capital is almost out of Google — We’ve mentioned venture firm Sequoia’s various conflicts and interests related to its backing of Google. But lately, the venture capital firm’s holdings in Google have dwindled to about 0.1%, according to a filing in April by the SEC. That leaves it with 412,823 shares, worth less than $200 million.