Microsoft Uses Yap's Speech Cloud for Voice Messaging

Yap, a provider of fully automated, cloud-based speech recognition services, announced today its selection by Microsoft to provide speech-to-text capabilities in its Talk to Text mobile application. Microsoft developed Talk to Text for Sprint, allowing subscribers to speak their text messages and emails. Talk to Text is available immediately for all Blackberry devices running on the Sprint network. 

Composing text messages and emails can be awkward and tedious. A simple message like 'I am running 30 minutes late - start the meeting without me' can take more than 50 keystrokes. Using Microsoft's Talk to Text application, Sprint subscribers can conveniently speak their messages, drastically reducing the keystrokes and time needed to compose an email or text message. 

"We are pleased to work with Yap to provide a useful and engaging mobile service to consumers," says Vic Bondi, senior director of sales and channels engineering at MSN.

The Yap speech cloud provides fully automated, speech recognition via a simple Web services interface. Using this interface, Microsoft was able to quickly integrate Yap's speech recognition into its Talk to Text application with just a few lines of code. 

"Yap's speech cloud empowers partners like Microsoft and Sprint to access very high-accuracy speech recognition with little effort," says Igor Jablokov, CEO of Yap. "Using a lightweight Web services interface, our speech cloud eliminates complex integration efforts and tedious tuning processes common to traditional speech recognition solutions."