Apparently Microsoft wants to make some dough off its rival's success: The company is developing an iPhone application.

YahooNews reports that Microsoft's acquired company Tellme has plans to release a speech-recognition application by June. In the past, Tellme has developed similar services for other handsets, including BlackBerry.

A complaint some have expressed about iPhone is its lack of speech-recognition capabilities. Despite the handset's versatility, the iPhone can't recognize voice commands to call a contact, for example. Tellme would solve part of the problem by enabling voice-activated search for local businesses, among other queries.

Other than Apple, Microsoft will also be competing with DialDirections, a smaller company that recently unveiled a very similar application called Say Where at the DEMOfall 2008 tech convention. DialDirections did not specify a release date but said the application would appear in the App Store soon.

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