A lot has happened so far this week with directory assistance and voice search providers.

Call Genie yesterday launched a new product suite. This includes three platforms that let DA providers, Yellow Pages publishers, carriers and search engines build branded mobile local search products. These products will utilize the assets gained in Call Genie’s November acquisition of BTS Logic and Phonespots. It also signals another evolutionary step for Call Genie in moving beyond voice-driven category search to more comprehensive mobile local search functionality for the above players. This will be a sizable opportunity, as stated many times here and in TKG’s recent mobile forecast.

V-Enable also launched a downloadable client version of its WAP-based FreeMobile411 for Sprint phones. The WAP-based version was released earlier this month and differentiates itself from other free 411 offerings by offering live human support (see video here). The product includes business and residential search, maps and directions, and category search, in addition to live operator assistance. The client version will allow users to speak queries while holding the talk button and receive visual results — multimodal functionality that will be one of its main selling points.

Speaking of multimodal, Tellme (one of the first and leading providers in voice/visual mobile search) launched a new search app for BlackBerry today at the Web 2.0 conference. The application will carry Tellme’s voice in/visual out functionality and will include business lookups, movies, traffic, weather, maps and driving directions. See the video demo here.

Lastly, The Kelsey Group has learned from knowledgeable sources that Jingle, which runs 1-800-FREE411, is for sale.

Yahoo! Local just integrated a drawing tool that lets users specify a radius within which to filter results. AskCity has a similar drawing tool (with additional shapes), and Urban Mapping has a platform that does this. On the advertiser side, AdWords and a few other SEM platforms allow marketers to specify where to serve their ads (by IP address).

We see this as a nice user-centric feature that will attract a certain set of power users in the highly competitive and quickly developing online mapping space. Different local searches carry with them different geographic relevance and implications for distance. I might be willing to travel 100 miles for a car, but I don’t want to go more than a few blocks to buy batteries. And with plumbers, roofers, landscapers and other trade services, distance hardly matters (beyond service area considerations) because they are coming to your house.

Building local/mapping products that include all these categories is a challenge because it’s difficult to apply different rules across categories for how mapping results are shown and what distance is relevant for what search (one reason why vertically segmented sites like Zillow, Trulia and AutoTrader have delivered more meaningful experiences to many users). Yahoo!’s new tool takes the guesswork out of it by allowing users to specify on the fly, literally, how far they’re willing to go.