Yap wins most votes of any mobile company at TechCrunch40
by Russell Shaw
Monitoring the TechCrunch 40 conference from my electronic cottage, I noted that presentations from five mobile services providers were a key part of Monday’s events.
Voting after these presentations provided a clear winner.
That’d be Yap, a voice-to-text translation services provider. Yap was the only one of the five mobile companies to score a 4.0 or above on a five-criteria scale that included “idea,” “execution,” and “presentation.”
According to the blurb about Yap on TechCrunch’s CrunchBase site:
Yap provides voice-to-text translation services for mobile phones. Users can say anything they like and Yap will send a text copy to anyone of their contacts. The service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them and then sending them out. They also have a text messaging application call Yap9 that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keyboards.
Yap9 seems to be where most of the fun is. Again from CrunchBase:
Yap9 is a unified mobile client that connects to the Yap freeform speech recognition platform. It contains a threaded text messaging application that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers in realtime: by simply saying something, your words will then be converted into text within seconds, and sent out. Additionally, it unifies the mobile web by allowing you to instantly access web services just by talking. You can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, YouTube, or interact with Facebook without having to type on your phone’s miniature keypad
And the reviews are coming in. Just a little while ago, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle)’s Ryan Kim wrote:
This could be a godsend for people who would like to text in their car and actually attempt it, much to the horror of other drivers. You can also imagine that IMing on a cell phone, one of those tough tasks, could actually come alive for cell phone users.
