This story about Yahoo! hiring away the R&D group of Nuance is very interesting. Yahoo! recently released Yahoo! Messenger with Voice (beating Google Talk, incidentally), bought DialPad earlier this year, and flat-out say they plan to use the DialPad acquisition to offer call-in/call-out connection to the regular phone system. The Nuance acquisition seems to imply they’re also planning to add IVR features as well. If Yahoo!’s doing it, you can be sure Microsoft and Google will be at it as well. Life’s going to get very interesting in the voice application space, hopefully around the time of ETel (which just opened registration).