Although Microsoft themselves haven't deigned to design applications for the iPhone directly (yet!), that doesn't mean their various subsidiaries and hangers-on aren't eyeing the platform. We already told you about the first zany Microsoft-tech to hit the iPhone, the Olympic-version of the Zumobi tiled-content application. Now Gizmodo brings word of another Microsoft-related company coming to the iPhone: TellMe.

TellMe is a more direct Microsoft subsidiary than Zumobi and it's essentially a voice recognition company whose technology is already used by Microsoft in various applications (notably for mobile users, on their excellent Live Search app for Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Symbian devices). They also have a stand-alone BlackBerry app that enables localized search. The basic premise is that you talk at your phone, your voice gets transmitted to the TellMe servers for very quick and very intelligent voice recognition and parsing, and finally those servers send your phone the information you asked for. All in all, it's a pretty sweet system ....as long as you have unlimited data.

Our hope / assumption is we'll see some voice recognition software that will not only handle local search (and integrate with Google Maps) but will also manage to search contacts. Pretty Please?

Hot on the heals of the Microsoft MacBU (makers of Office 2008 for Mac) talking iPhone SDK, comes word (via Fortune) that Microsoft's recently acquired TellMe division, which specializes in voice recognition, is also eyeing Apple's little market grabber:

“If the SDK supports [voice recording and location-based information],” [general manager Mike] McCue told Fortune in February, “we’re absolutely going to get a version out there as soon as we can, get TellMe out there on the iPhone.”

Of course, limits placed on the iPhone SDK may well make this impossible without the mythical "special dispensation" from Apple. We do know Bill Gates loves him some "natural interfaces", though, and who knows how long it will be until VistaMob 7 or Surface ship, so is this like back in the early days when Microsoft got all GUI on Mac Excel? Or is Microsoft really all just about the software profits, man? What do you think?