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Maybe there is a chance for Android competitors to Apple's Siri voice-powered search. The first Siri clone was the cleverly-named anagram Iris and has been something of an amusing joke since it launched shortly after Siri was announced. The builders behind Iris, India-based development studio Dexetera, have made a partnership that will give Iris Siri-like capabilities without directly copying Apple's approach.

Dexetera announced today that it is tying Iris into the database for question-and-answer website ChaCha. While ChaCha may not be the top of the line when it comes to answers on the Internet, Dexetera making partnerships is a good first step towards lending the app some legitimacy.

A service that is only available in Asia is enabling short voice recordings. Called Bubbly (warning: turn your audio down before clicking on the link), think of it as SMS for group voice messaging. You can insert your voice recordings in a text, and like Twitter, follow certain people. You click on the link and the recording is played back as a voice call. Over the past three months, Bubbly has launched on Vodafone in India, SoftBank Mobile in Japan and Indonesia's biggest mobile phone operator Telekomunikasi Selular. There is a Facebook plug-in so you can track who is bubbling along.

Twilio announced at its first-ever developers' conference in San Francisco this morning a new product called Twilio Connect that will help app developers provide messaging and call functions within apps while also helping them monetize their efforts. Twilio takes care of the billing of the end user of an app for any phone calls and SMS allowing developers to price their products using software-as-a-service model.

It is an interesting concept for developers looking to add communication functionality to their apps while also getting paid. App monetization is one of the largest problems facing developers currently and Twilio takes that to heart. In that regard, Twilio is also teaming up with venture capitalist Dave McClure and super angel Ron Conway to set up a seed fund to developers using Twilio Connect.

Google continues the blistering pace of updates to Google Maps today with the announcement of voice search for Maps on the desktop. Only users of Google's Chrome browser get the feature. This could speed up queries for hard-to-spell places, and it also returns queries like "Directions from Portland to San Francisco."

The Google LatLong Team is cranking out features. This month, Google Maps on the desktop has gotten a weather layer, it has become available on over 40 new country domains, and it added shortlinks to make sharing maps and directions easier. Voice search on the desktop adds another new convenience, at least for Chrome users.

Remember when phones were used for, you know, phone calls? Janet Hall, senior consultant for TMNG, does. What's more, Hall says that voice communications will rise again away from a commodity to a growth market.

One tried and true technology is seeing some new activity this summer, with two distinct efforts underway to voice-enable websites from Twilio and Angel.com. Both companies are trying to streamline the experience and make it easier to build voice add-ons.

That joke about how your smartphone can "even make phone calls" is pretty cliche by now. But it raises the question: why hasn't anyone done anything to improve the state of voice calls on smart phones? After all, we're carrying around powerful computers in our pockets, but the technology involved in phone calls on smart phones hasn't evolved much.

One company trying to change that is Thrutu, an application that adds real-time features to Android calls. For example, using Thrutu you can send money with PayPal from within a call, share and view a photo or "doodle" on a shared screen. It adds a number of possibilities for collaboration using mobile phones.

Today, Thrutu announced that an API that will enable developers to build new features or integrate existing applications with its platform. You can request access here. Use the reference code RWW1 for priority access.

Google is allowing some users to search the web by voice on their desktop browsers, a spokesperson from the company confirmed to us today in an email. Selected users are shown a little grey microphone at the end of the search box. The experiment was first mentioned by San Francisco's Matt Schlicht, social product lead at live streaming video service Ustream, and was written up by the blog Mashable. (Turns out Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable posted on this even earlier, this morning.)

Voice search may or may not come to the desktop browser version of Google beyond this experiment, but it would good for Google's long term interests if it did. Would it be good for users? Do you want to use voice input for search when you have access to a full keyboard, as opposed to a little Android phone? I suspect for many people the size of a keyboard is a less limiting factor than comfort using it for input. Voice search on the desktop could change the nature of peoples' search queries and provide a lot more speech data for Google to analyze and learn from.

It can really feel like you've stepped into the future when you pick up your smartphone, hold it to your face and search for something simply by speaking. When you ask for "car parking" with a thick Boston accent, however, Google might think you're searching for the late great Tupac Shakur and the future suddenly seems a little less bright. Luckily, Google has introduced personalized voice search, which hopes to account for any number of variations in how we say what we say.

Social networking will be a more popular communication mechanism than either voice or SMS, according to 31 global mobile operators cited in a new report from Airwide Solutions. The report, commissioned by Airwide and performed by research agency mobileSQUARED, asked operators across Europe, North America and in the Asia-Pacific regions what they believed would be the most popular applications and the top forms of communication in 2015.