Yap, Can Amazon Take on Siri by Acquiring You?

Palm Beach, FL 11/11/11 (StreetBeat) –Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) acquired a voice recognition company called Yap this week and the tech press is buzzing with speculation that the online retail giant plans to add voice-to-text capabilities to a future version of its Kindle Fire tablet to better compete against Apple's Siri technology for its own mobile devices.

Siri, the most talked-about (and to) addition to Apple's next-generation iPhone 4S smartphone, has laid down a gauntlet of sorts for Apple rivals to come up with their own voice-responsive personal assistants. Google, Apple's chief rival in the mobile operating system market, has improved the speech recognition in its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS, set to appear in smartphones and tablets before the year is out.

Apple hasn't included Siri in an iPad, though it likely will in the iPad 3. Amazon, of course, hasn't even released its first tablet yet. The Kindle Fire is riding a wave of buzz, propelled by an attractive $199 sticker price and Amazon's content and services clout, but it won't actually be made available until next Tuesday.

As mentioned, Ice Cream Sandwich has beefed up Android's speech recognition and the updated OS now features continuous, real-time speech-to-text dictation. Amazon has shown with the Kindle Fire that it's perfectly willing to take what Android gives it and tweak the heck out of the OS to fit its own needs. At this point, it would probably help to know what Yap does, exactly.

The startup's "first and only branded consumer product, Yap Voicemail, was a Google-Voice-like transcription app available for iOS and Android," according to Justin Ruckman of the Charlotte, N.C.-based CLTBlog, who is acquainted with brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, who founded the company in 2006. Ruckman said he used Yap Voicemail for more than a year and was "surprised last month when I received a notice that the service was to be discontinued, effective in only a matter of days."

The Jablokovs landed $8 million in funding in 2007 and 2008, but Yap never managed to get its product out of private beta, according to Ruckman. Igor Jablokov did manage to get some ink in The New York Times around the time of Yap's Series A funding round, however, telling the newspaper that he and his brother were inspired to start the company to get their kid sister to stop text-messaging in the car.

So what do others say about Yap? Madrigal dug up this quote from Paul Grim, general partner at SunBridge Partners, the Charlotte VC that led Yap's 2008 round of funding: "Yap is truly a leader in freeform speech recognition and driving innovation in the mobile user experience. It is increasingly clear that the fastest, easiest, and safest way to interact with services on a mobile device is using your voice, and Yap makes this both possible and intuitive."

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