Tellme, the voice services subsidiary of Microsoft, is announcing “one-button” voice access for Windows-enabled mobile phones, as well as some new technologies to improve call automation for customer service centers.

Aiming at smartphone users who might prefer to use voice commands over the Apple iPhone’s popular touch, tap and swoosh features, Microsoft is trying to differentiate its mobile offerings.

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A few weeks ago, BoomTown had lunch at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View with Dan’l Lewin, the software giant’s corporate VP for strategic and emerging business development.

In other words, Microsoft’s friendly face in the Valley, in charge of its operations there, which has about 2,000 employees.

Most of them work for other Microsoft divisions, leaving Lewin primarily responsible for the company’s relationships with start-ups, venture capitalists and industry partners.

In other words, hoping that Google now seems scarier than Microsoft used to be.

Here’s a video interview with him about all that and more.

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Earlier this week, I jokingly said Tellme Founder Mike McCue displayed “the cheeriness of someone with acute Stockholm syndrome and $800 million in Microsoft money,” after he was quoted in an Associated Press story about what life was like after a takeover by the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant.

“We are pretty much doing everything we were doing before–just a lot more of it,” said McCue about Microsoft (MSFT) ownership of Tellme, a message squarely aimed at Yahoo (YHOO) CEO and Founder Jerry Yang, who has thus far refused Microsoft’s unsolicited advances.

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Along with my visit to the HQ of Tellme (see my post and video on that here) in Mountain View, Calif., to check out the treatment it is getting as a recent subsidiary of Microsoft (pay attention, Yahoo!), I also talked to Founder and now General Manager Mike McCue about trends in the voice-automated services [...]

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Since BoomTown did an obsessive countdown after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang last year unwisely promised a 100-day, top-to-bottom look at the company, with “no sacred cows” spared (as it turned out, they all were), I decided that–after the month-mark had passed since Microsoft made its unsolicited bid for Yahoo–it was time for a count-up!

Thus, Day 32!

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