Yahoo has announced that two former TellMe executives will be joining the company in the pursuit of new “voice-related initiatives.” This announcement follows Microsoft’s acquisition of TellMe just a few weeks ago and Google’s recent release of a 411 directory service.

Gary Clayton, TellMe’s Chief Creative Officer, and Victor Chen, an executive as well, will most likely be working closely with Jeff Bonforte, Vice President of Yahoo’s Real Time Communications group. Interestingly, at a recently industry conference, Jeff mentioned that he will be announcing a new feature/product/service soon that he promised would be “very, very exciting.” In light of these exec moves, that brief mention seems to be a sure sign that a Yahoo mobile voice search app or service is on the way.

This would help bolster Yahoo’s existing Yahoo Go 2.0 and oneSearch offerings and compete against Microsoft’s almost certainly soon to be released mobile voice addition to Windows Live Search for Mobile and Google’s combination of Google Maps mobile app and their new Goog 411 IVR-based directory service. All in all, it looks like there’s a battle looming in the mobile voice-based search space: one seemingly centered around GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft).

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