Tellme Voice Services Coming to Windows Mobile 6.5, Better Than iPhone’s Touch?

I don’t know about you, but I typically only talk to my phone when there’s a person on the other end of the line. Tellme, owned by Microsoft, sees things differently.

In fact, according to a recent study 70 percent of smart phone users said voice is superior to keypad or touch-based methods when it comes to mobile tasks like looking up business listings, sending text messages, and getting info like movie times and weather. And starting this fall Tellme will let Windows Mobile 6.5 phone owners do all the above and more.

With the touch of a button, Tellme’s service will let you do much more than voice dial. You can send a text by saying “text,” and then speak the message and send it to a contact. But the more impressive feature to me is the ability to search the Web with your voice, a capability Microsoft has already delivered to devices like the Samsung Instinct. You can say things like “weather in San Francisco, Californina” or “New York Yankees score.”

So how well does the service work? And will it really make your life easier than an intuitive touch interface like the iPhone?

During a brief hands-on demo with Tellme running on a Samsung Omnia ($591.00), the service delivered search results fairly quickly (usually under 10 seconds), and I liked that weather results and movie times were displayed in a clean interface without any surrounding clutter.

Tellme also claims that using this service will save you effort compared to touch input only. The company says it requires four touches and more than 20 keystrokes on average to find a business with the iPhone and only one button push and one verbal command to find the same business with Tellme. This may be true, but for those who want voice search capability there’s always the Google Mobile App for iPhone, and Apple’s 3.0 software will reportedly have voice recording and voice control capabilities (though details are sketchy.)

Even though it’s not even in beta yet, I think Tellme has potential, especially for those times when you’re on the go and don’t have time to type (like when you’re behind the wheel). But in order for this service to succeed I think it will have to be as fast as touch. And over time I’d like to see Tellme as deeply integrated with the content that’s on your Windows Mobile phone as it is the cloud, from controlling music playback and lauching Web sites to searching and composing e-mails.