In less than a decade, mobile devices have undergone a radical transformation. Originally designed just as telephones, mobile devices are now morphing into highly personalized, multi-purpose computers that may soon be more central to our lives than the desktop PC. What is driving this rapid evolution?

Clearly, recent advances in mobile technology are part of the answer. Today’s mobile devices have more computing power, more bandwidth, more storage capacity and many more services available than cell phones did just a few years ago. As a result, users can now download video content, watch streaming television broadcasts, and store thousands of songs and hundreds of movies on their mobile devices.

The ability to personalize mobile devices is another part of the answer. Mobile devices now include my contacts, my preferences and my content. More than just cell phones, they are becoming multi-function handheld computers that the average person will own and carry on a daily basis to perform such tasks as:

1.Search for information, people, and businesses
2.Get maps and driving directions
3.Discover, download, and play multimedia content

The wildly popular Apple iPhone has already started an evolutionary wave by delivering many of these capabilities in a sleek, user-friendly form factor that serves as a phone, a music player and a mobile Internet device. But Apple’s breakthrough design doesn’t just prove that mobile technology is finally ready to take center stage. The worldwide response to the iPhone also demonstrates that the demand is there--and growing.

Yet a significant barrier remains. Despite the rapid evolution of mobile devices, they still lack an efficient user interface. The peripheral devices--keyboard and mouse--that work so well in the PC world don’t have satisfactory corollaries in the mobile one. Trying to enter data using a small screen and tiny keypad is time-consuming and cumbersome at best. Unless a better, more intuitive user interface can be developed, the use of mobile devices as all-purpose, personalized computers will necessarily be limited.

There is a solution, however, and it’s hidden in plain sight. The answer is not to port the PC interface to the mobile user; the answer is to develop an entirely new user interface optimized for mobility. And what is the simplest, most intuitive user interface of all? Voice communication.

With voice-enabled search capabilities, mobile devices will quickly become central to consumers’ daily lives by allowing them to easily access the web and search for virtually any type of content using their mobile devices. Many companies recognize this enormous opportunity and now plan to enter the mobile voice search market. But the interfaces they are developing are typically based on existing speech-to-text or dictation technologies licensed from big players like IBM and Nuance. These technologies were originally developed and optimized for speech-to-text dictation rather than for voice search. That said, mobile voice search has an entirely different set of sound-recognition challenges.  Ultimately, these licensed solutions may reach technological limitations and not succeed.

In order to design a voice interface for mobile devices that does succeed, speech recognition companies will have to think outside the box and create their own innovative core technologies. Only when we have a complete, scalable, fast and accurate voice-enabled solution will we be able to start realizing the full potential of our mobile devices.

by Keyvan Mohajer, founder, president and chief executive officer, MELODIS