Yap does voice to text for your phone
Voice to text comes to your mobile phone with Yap.
Here's a useful concept: say you're really sick of dealing with your phone's tiny keypad to type in text messages. What if you could simply say what you wanted to write down, and have the tool fill it in for you? Yap is a new service that's trying to fill that need with their new mobile phone client. It's aimed at teens, who the company claims 66% of text while driving. Yap will read off your friend's responses, meaning you don't have to pay attention to what they're writing. The service works both ways, so your friend who has it installed could theoretically have an asynchronous text-only conversation with you too.
In addition to the text app, Yap throws in some integration with popular Web services like Amazon, Digg, Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook, Google News, AOL search, Flickr, Google Photos, Twitter, and Orbitz among others. You can simply say a search term, and it will convert it into a written search query on the correct service right on your phone's browser. The one for Twitter is especially cool since you can just say your status update, and it will convert it into a live Tweet.
The company is planning to support its service through "real time advertisements" which will pull context from your conversation, and serve up relevant ads. Their example showed a conversation about coffee, wherein the app pulled up a link for listings of Starbucks nearby. The service is still in private beta, and launching at this morning's TechCrunch40 conference.
Related: Highly useful: CallWave transcribes your voicemail
