Competitive products, such as the voice search in Microsoft's Live search for mobile, can only handle queries for specific local information, such as directions to a local pizza parlor.

Oddly, especially for a mobile search engine, Taptu doesn't feature any maps in its search results and it doesn't seem to optimize its search based on your location.

Scott Jones, chief executive of ChaCha, said vlingo's speech recognition is the best he has seen on a cell phone - though still not as good as human recognition.