For a review on iphone speech recognition see:

http://speechanalytics.blogspot.com/2008/09/iphone-speech-recongiotion-status.html

The "inquirers" articles (sp intentional) would have a little more credibility if they could learn to spell.
It's i-Phone, not I-phone. Like iPod. Go on - try it.
Or we can keep on calling it " the inqUIReR. Sounds like you just talked to someone about Apple instead of doing some on line research.....

Who's the author of this piece??? I don't think "learnt" is even a word, LOL. Also: "Despite the fact that both videos have drawn respectable viewing Youtube figures," isn't exactly top notch journalism... I figures people really like George W., cause they re-elected him, LOL... Oh, and there this: "VST is now part of Nuance Communications which claims to be the fastest growing software company with revenues going from $388 million to an estimated $600 million in a year." Where are these revenues going??? Ahhh, you mean the are gRowing.... "The company's new general manager, Steve Miller revealed that the company expects the mobile sector to show the biggest level of growth – around 40 per cent." What does this last statement have to do with the premise of the article??? If I wanted to know the projected market growth of VST then I'd go to yahoo finance and look for it under NUAN; the article is about Apple's disapproval of VST's VR application... duhhh...

Proper nouns start with capital letters. All else is marketing.

> This has a distinct whiff of that old
> American disease – the 'not-invented-
> here' syndrome.

No, this is the whiff of telecoms operator dictating what one can load on one's device. In the end, the iPhone is a cell phone and AT&T doesn't want to accidentally allow a third-party VOIP application which would bypass the phone-plan's minutes limit.

Google's 800 line does local search, quite useful: 800-GOOG-411

http://www.google.com/goog411/

Of course, it's not-invented here, has nothing to do with a non US company but Apple already has voice technology on the Mac - why would you turn over a key feature of a future add-on to someone else?