Yap is a free voice-to-text speech recognition application for mobile phones that allows users to convert spoken voice into text for SMS text messaging and interacting with mobile web services such as Google, Wikipedia, AOL, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Flickr, YouTube, Google News, Google Maps and Twitter. Its works by capturing and uploading your voice from the device to their server that will translate anything you say into text. The text then appears on your phone’s screen a second later.

+ Yap contains a threaded SMS text messaging application that saves conversations and allows you to reply to text messages by speaking into the software. Users would be able to answer a text message just by pressing a button and having the service record and transcribe your voice which then appears as a message within seconds.

+ Users can send notes on Facebook, find videos on YouTube, change presence alerts on Twitter, check eBay auctions, research on Wikipedia, buy books from Amazon, read news on Digg/Google News, check flight status on Orbitz, find the nearest Starbucks coffee store and lookup directions on Google Maps all using voice recognition.

You may also want to read about Vlingo, another Java based Voice to Text SMS, Mapping and Web Search mobile application. Vlingo operates in a similiar fashion, uploading voice to a server and transcribing it into text, in real time.