Another cool company I came across recently is a Canadian startup that offers location based services on a mobile phones - CallGenie. They have an interesting partnership model with Yellow Pages, wireline and mobile carries and Directory Assistance to provide interactive voice based search for yellow pages directory content by category  and location. Users speak into the phone and system does search and delivers voice response – cool for those times you are stuck in traffic or cannot type and need to find
restaurants, hotels, kinkos or just about anything.

Call Genie has an Enhanced Voice Directory Product (EVD) that combines modern speech recognition and syntheis technology from Nuance with sophisticated proprietary grammers and search algorithms. The EVD product  guides callers through an interactive voice dialog to find merchants in the category and location of their choice. For a selected merchant, EVD™ lets callers hear additional information, such as how to locate them, and lets the caller connect through to the merchant.

Based in Canada, Call Genie offers EVD™ to Yellow Pages publishers, fixed and mobile carriers and Directory Assistance operators around the world. Check them out at http://www.callgenie.com/