Soon that cell will be all ears. Voice-recognition technology will cut out the wait time

Two weeks ago, Janna Van Hoven tried to download "The Golden Girls" theme song as a ring tone for her new cell phone.

After an hour of fiddling with her phone, she gave up, unsure if the ring tone was even available. She wanted it as a reminder of her college days, when she sat around with her friend watching the television show.

"I wanted that ring tone so it would play when my friend called me. But I had to go through different menus and search through all the songs and sometimes it was hard to find the search option," said Van Hoven, 26, of San Francisco. "It was just a pain."

Van Hoven’s frustration is a growing reality for cell phone users and a vexing problem for cell phone carriers. While carriers and their content partners are offering a bounty of media and information on their phone, the devices themselves haven’t done a good job so far of actually finding and accessing all the offerings.

But that’s about to change. A handful of companies is creating solutions that allow users to find what they’re looking for by utilizing an already familiar cell phone behavior: speaking into the phone.

Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer

Full Story: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/04/24/BUGO8IDCD71.DTL&type=business