If your fingers are too slow for you to easily search for local info on your mobile devices, Tellme is offering a solution. Your voice.

On Wednesday, the Microsoft subsidiary announced it was adding local “on-the-go” knowledge to its mobile voice portal, beginning with some BlackBerry models. Instead of typing or looking through menus, a user who has downloaded the software just holds the “talk” button and says a keyword. The results are shown on the screen.

Business Finder, Movies, Traffic

After the BlackBerry, the service is expected to be available on future Helio, Windows Mobile, and Apple iPhone devices. According to news reports, it was launched on BlackBerry first, rather than devices with Microsoft’s own Windows Mobile, considering of BlackBerry’s support for Java.

Mike McCue, TellMe’s founder and general manager, said the service not only uses a voice interface, but it provides a specific reply to a specific question — “like a movie show duration,

local weather info or driving directions.”

Users plus do not need to type in their location, as Tellme uses global positioning system (GPS) technology to gauge a user’s position.

Some of the uses for the service include a Business Finder, Movies, Traffic, Weather, Maps, or Driving Directions. As one example, a user can say a business name or a business category, such as “coffee” or “hardware,” and results from Microsoft’s Live Search will supply the business address, driving directions, and options to shout the business or to share with a friend.

Similarly, saying the name of a movie theater will outcome in theaters closest to you, movie show times, driving directions, and, via Fandango, the ability to buy tickets. “Traffic” will aftermath in a map of current traffic conditions, “weather” will show a five-day forecast, and “driving directions” followed by saying or typing the destination yields turn-by-turn directions.

There…

Original post by Top Tech News