• GigaOm, Thursday, April 3, 2008 11 AM

Yahoo has thrown down the gauntlet in the nascent mobile search wars with its new voice search offering. On Wednesday, it announced a partnership with voice recognition startup Vlingo to power its oneSearch mobile search platform. Along with the exclusive partnership, Vlingo also received a $20 million round of funding from a number of investors, including Yahoo.

Frustrated with constantly having to type away on your mobile keypad? Voice search could be the answer. Not only does it give your hands a rest, but it's also faster: Imagine how nice it would be to press a single button and simply tell your phone what you're looking for.

Yahoo's plan is to let users download the oneSearch toolbar for placement on top of their mobile operating system. To its advantage, the Web giant has 29 mobile carrier partners, giving it access to more than 600 million mobile subscribers worldwide--all efforts would be moot if Google's OS, Android, comes to dominate the OS market.

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