The latest news doing rounds in the industry is that Aircel announced a tie-up with Facebook, which allows users to update their status by simply recording their voice over phone. This allows users to update their status messages on Facebook, without having to use internet (Refer to the press release for more).

View the demonstration for more clarity.

Markets like India have a fairly low smart-phone adoption. Statistics taken from Neilsen’s whitepaper ‘Mobile Youth Around the World’ reflect that India tends to skew feature phone with 90% penetration, while smart-phone adoption lingers at a meager 10%.

However, this is not entirely a novel phenomenon and mobile social networks like Bubble motion have endeavoured to bring these services to people long time back. Bubble motion calls itself ‘Twitter with voice’. It allows users to get voice messages from people they follow. The technology of ‘voice SMS’ dates back to as early as 2002. Bubbly had gained traction in India owing to the fact that they had signed on many celebrities to broadcast their messages to the followers.

SpinVox, another speech recognition service, launched a few years back, gripped the European markets. It converts voice to text and allowed users to send updates on networks like Twitter, Facebook and Jaiku.

There have been several applications available in the market, like the Vlingo iPhone app which has speech recognition with intelligence to listen in to conversations and translate them into plain text. Mobile podcasting apps like Cinch allow people to record and transmit messages on Twitter/ Facebook  and other social networks.

However, services like Bubbly and Aircel allow users to update messages without having to download any external application or without having to subscribe to GPRS, which is a deal-breaker for a lot of users in India.

We will keep you posted on more news over Voice updates. Do let us know your know thoughts.