Mobile phones can do lots of things: search the Web, download music, send e‑mail. But the vast ­majori­ty of the 233 million Americans who own them never use them for more than calls and short text messages. One reason is that other features often require users to enter sentences or long search terms, a tedious task.

Speech-recognition interfaces could make such features easier to use. Vlingo, a startup in Cambridge, MA, is coming to market with a ­simple user interface that provides speech recognition across mobile-phone applications. "We are not developing the core speech-recognition engine," says cofounder Michael ­Phillips, a former MIT research scientist and founder of SpeechWorks, which developed call-center speech interfaces for clients including Amtrak. "We don't need to do that again." Instead, Vlingo takes speech, turns it into text, and provides a simple way to correct errors using the phone's navigation keys, helping the system "learn." The user's spoken words travel over a mobile Internet connection for analysis on Vlingo's server, sparing the phone the heavy computational work; the transcription appears less than two seconds later.