A lot of fuss has been made about the power of Microsoft's purchase of Tellme, for example with Jeff Raikes, President, Business Division, Microsoft, explaining their vision for using Tellme's technologies in the mobile search area as being fundamental to their strategy. "Frankly, today TellMe already does more mobile search support than Google and Yahoo combined", said Raikes.

But how much of the power of mobile search is actually tied up with the input/voice recognition component?  Not much I would suggest, while not denying the convenience factor.

For instance Omar Tawakol, Chief Advertising Officer, Medio Systems, recently said in Search Insider:

In practical terms, assuring a pleasing mobile search means a number of things, including: providing consumers a click-saving experience that returns answers instead of links; inferring a consumer's context from his or her device, location and other information within ranking algorithms; balancing the subscriber's short-term and long-term preferences to present personalized, relevant results that adapt to a consumer's changing context; and providing rich client interfaces with streamlined interfaces including custom shortcuts, auto-completion of search terms, or voice inputs to simplify the user experience. Mobile search will ultimately only see the same success as its online counterpart when it provides consumers with an experience that matches the consumer context.

Not much of that above is actually helped by the Tellme front end, which means that perhaps their backend is much further developed than meets the eye?

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