| Website | yapme.com |
| @yapme | |
| Category | Mobile/Wireless |
| Phone | +1.704.960.1776 |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 5/06 |
| Description | voice-to-text conversion |
| Total | $8M |
| Angel, 3/07 Mark Stabingas Timothy Biltz | $1.5M |
| Series A, 6/08 Sunbridge Partners Harbert Management Corporation Pittco Management | $6.5M |
Yap is a B2B provider of voice-to-text conversions for service providers, using natural and unconstrained speech recognition. It was a TechCrunch finalist in 2007 and was also named North Carolina’s “Early Stage Company of the Year” once unveiled. Their R&D team previously worked on Apple’s iPod, Honda’s navigational systems, IBM’s ViaVoice and Nuance’s Dragon.
Yap white labels its SaaS platform to enable diverse use cases, including messaging and voicemail-to-text. For example, Shape’s IM+ applications for BlackBerry and iPhone integrated this in their next generation instant messaging applications. Their end users can say anything they want to and have Yap’s platform transcribe it into text (far more convenient than typing on the iPhone’s glass or fumbling with a BlackBerry while driving). Cincinnati Bell, a regional carrier, recently announced that it would use Yap-based technology to convert subscriber voicemails into text.
The carrier was a competitive win away from SpinVox. Part of the allure for Yap’s service is that it’s completely automated, so you won’t have intermediary humans listening to your messages, typing them out, and then sending them back out, making it a real boon for privacy. Because they are machine powered, this also results is lower costs, higher speeds and greater consistency.
| Website | yapme.com/messaging.html |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | September 17, 2007 |
| Tags | voice-to-text |
“Yap9” was a prototype of a unified mobile client that connected to Yap’s freeform speech recognition platform. It contained a threaded text messaging application that allowed you to keep in touch with friends, family, and coworkers in realtime: by simply saying something, your words would then be converted into text within seconds, and sent out. Additionally, it unified the mobile web by allowing you to instantly access web services just by talking. You could search Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo, YouTube, or interact with Facebook without having to type on your phone’s miniature keypad.
Since it’s unveiling at the TechCrunch 2007 event, this product has morphed into a white label play. Yap now powers diverse messaging clients as it repurposed itself as a B2B supplier.
| Website | yapme.com/voicemail.html |
| Stage | Live |
| Launch Date | April 1, 2008 |
| Tags | voice-to-text |
