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General Information

Websiteyapme.com
CategoryMobile
Phone+1.704.372.1470
Employees
Founded5/06

Offices

Charlotte, USA
1930 Camden Road
Suite 2040
Charlotte, NC, 28203
USA

People

CEO & Co-Founder
COO & Co-Founder
Chairman
Director
Director
VP of WW Sales/Business Development
VP of Engineering
Director of Developer Relations
Principal Engineer

Funding

Competitors

Tags

Yap

Yap provides voice-to-text conversion for mobile phones, using an advanced form of speech recognition. Users can say anything they want and the Yap Platform will send back a textual representation. As a bonus, the service is completely automated so you won’t have intermediary Yap employees listening to your messages, typing them, and then sending them back out; a boon for your privacy. They also have a text messaging application called Yap9 that allows you to quickly keep in touch with friends, family, and co-workers. Beyond that, users can also use the application to instantly query mobile web services just by talking. They can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and YouTube, or interact with Facebook without using their phones’ miniature keypads.

Two brothers, Igor and Victor Jablokov, were inspired to create the service after hearing about their kid sister dangerously texting on her phone while driving (66% of teens do this!). The team behind the service has also worked on Apple’s iPod, Honda’s navigational systems, and IBM’s ViaVoice.

As their platform can support a number of use cases, from messaging to voice search and voicemail-to-text, so does the number of companies they overlap with this innovation. Their primary competitors in this space include Tellme Networks, recently acquired by Microsoft, and Vlingo, recently funded by Yahoo. Other competitors include Jott, PhoneTag, and SpinVox, who all use a combination of automation and humans to convert your voicemails into text. Messaging competitors include Sequoia’s Bubble Motion and KPCB’s Pinger, although they only allow you to send audio files to your recipients without conversion into text.

Products

Yap9

Websiteyapme.com
Launch DateSeptember 17, 2007
Tags voice-to-text

Yap9 is a unified mobile client that connects to the Yap freeform speech recognition platform. It contains a threaded text messaging application that allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers in realtime: by simply saying something, your words will then be converted into text within seconds, and sent out. Additionally, it unifies the mobile web by allowing you to instantly access web services just by talking. You can search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, or interact with Facebook without having to type on your phone’s miniature keypad.

Yap screenshot
Above: Yap9 Screenshot -- #1
Uploaded: 2/5/08

Traffic Analytics

Compete

Yapme

Comments

Gautam "Bob" Vora - June 11, 2008 at 12:08pm
I think its a great service and would really help unoganized people like me to atleast organize my voicemail messages easily.
Seth Levy - June 10, 2008 at 6:29pm
It sounds interesting, but I'm skeptical it can work effectively with the amount of ambient noise in many cellphone use-cases.
Olivia Wylie - June 10, 2008 at 10:58am
I think this is a great new way of texting. It takes less time to text and is more efficient. Plus it is great when your driving , you never have to take your eyes off the road . I think not only teens but people of all ages will find this new way of texting fun.
Matt Bradbury - September 17, 2007 at 10:36pm
A really neat service. It will be great to see people using their voices instead of their thumbs to text message with others quickly.

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Sources

  1. Exclusive: Charlotte's Yap raises $1.5 million (techjournalsouth.com) [edit]
  2. Yap Gets $6.5 Million To Give Your Thumbs A Rest (techcrunch.com) [edit]
Edit This Page (Revision History)
Last Edited 9/28/08

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