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The company's oneSearch 2.0 mobile search technology is coming to multiple BlackBerry and Nokia handsets.
By Marin Perez, InformationWeek, Oct. 13 2008, 1030 hrs
Yahoo is expanding its mobile voice search onto multiple Nokia and BlackBerry phones, the company said Thursday.
Users of some Nokia S60 handsets like the N95 can now use voice recognition with Yahoo's oneSearch 2.0 home-screen shortcut. Once it's installed, users can speak to find stock quotes, sports scores, and more. Yahoo said it also includes search assist, spelling suggestions, and real-time related concepts for more refined search results.
Additionally, Yahoo Go 3.0 will integrate the voice search, and it can be downloaded onto select BlackBerry and Nokia S40 and S60 devices. The company said the voice-recognition technology is currently only available in the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and Canada.
These moves are just the latest in Yahoo's multipronged strategy in the mobile space. On the mobile search side, the company trails Google by a significant margin, but Yahoo continues to make headway in that space with its oneSearch offerings, and it recently signed a deal to be the default search provider for most of AT&T's cell phones.
Yahoo is also making a play for mobile developers with its Blueprint platform, and said it will enable content creators to write an application once and have it run on a variety of mobile operating systems. The company introduced the platform in September, and used it to build and optimize the oneConnect app for iPhone.
Yahoo will be competing with Google for developer mindshare as well, as Google's Android platform is weeks away from its first commercially available hardware.
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