Online search by humming

Talking to machines is becoming more and more normal. Just think about the many voice mails. Speech recognition is again hot and will remain hot. I think speech will be one of the most used ways to interact with machine and for example search. New initiatives around speech recognition arise on a daily bases. I selected two examples of how audio search can be helpful. What do you think of it? Is this the future?

TellMe: This allows you (free) to search using speech for the exact address of business in a specific city. It is the vocal 411 version of search. You need to have a mobile which supports the application of TellMe (Java). Just call and say the city and state you are searching in and the business you are looking for. Phone, address information and possibly route will pop up in the screen of the phone. It is all to easy. Additional information you can receive is stocks, weather, traffic etc.

Midomi: This service makes it very easy to search and find music and people. You can use your voice or humming to instantly connect to your most favourite music. The services also allows you to connect to the people who have the same taste in music or download the songs you searched for. Just see the YouTube movie of it. Sorry but the voice over is in French, but just by looking (if you don't understand French just like me) will also show and explain the concept.

More information: Query by humming with the vocalsearch system.pdf