"Cat got your tongue?" my wife asked as we bumped along the freeway one recent afternoon. "I wonder where that phrase comes from?" she added a moment later. Now here was an opportunity for a husband to be useful. I knew I could simply say, "Origin of the phrase 'cat got your tongue' " into Google's new Nexus One or an Apple iPhone loaded with Microsoft's new Bing search app — the two smartphones I happened to have in my possession — to answer her second question. The spoken word is becoming an effective way to overcome the frustrations and limitations of typing on a smartphone. Google and Microsoft now offer speech-enabled Web search on a variety of mobile platforms. And a growing number of iPhone and Android apps — and services like Google Voice and YouTube's recent launch of automatic captioning of videos — can transcribe speech into text. The technology has evolved to a point where speech is a central feature on the Nexus One, allowing users to speak a tweet, an e-mail or a Facebook update. "2010 is the year when speech goes mainstream," said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for Tellme Mobile Speech, a Mountain View company that became a unit of Microsoft in 2007. "There have been years and years of speech applications and many of them have failed, but you're hitting a convergence point where a lot of technologies are coming together."
for further: www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_14514306