Yap translates voice to text

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Entrepreneur Victor Jablokov didn’t have to look far for inspiration.

“When is the last time your teenager picked up the phone? They don’t answer to cell phones calls anymore. My sister is the same way. She won’t pick up her phone,” he said. 

His sister also drives and like a lot of teenagers, answers text messages along the way.

The constant button pushing means less focus on the road, says Jablokov.

“You have the same attention span as someone who’d be drunk driving,” he said.

With that in mind, Jablokov and his brother came up with an idea. 

“If you can develop the technology that can convert what people say and let them send that text message. It is just a much safer solution,” said Jablokov. 

The result is a company called Yap, Inc. , and technology that takes the repeated button-pushing out of texting.

“It’s an application you would install over the air. It doesn’t know what you’re going to say when you start talking. But we can recognize it and convert it into a sentence for you to send a text message or do a Web search,” said Jablokov.

Unlike other voice-to-text services, this happens automatically without a human having to translate.

The Web search element takes Yap a step further, letting users search Google or Wikipedia with voice commands. You can also send voice-to-text updates to the popular social networking Web site Facebook. 

There is one stipulation, though.

“You have to speak clearly and enunciate and you get better performance. We joke around that we will help people learn how to speak proper English,” he said.

Yap is currently in the testing phase and Jablokov would like to have it on the market by early next year.

“We’re right now in talks with some major carriers,” he said.

The current application works on phones like the Motorola Razor. The company hopes to expand the technology to cover other popular devices like the BlackBerry and iPhone. 

The company’s offices are in the Design Center in Charlotte’s South End neighborhood.  Yap recently secured $6.5 million in funding to get their product to market.

“There is a market out there. What it takes to send one text message in terms of time. We can send 10 or 15 in that same time span,” said Jablokov.