While BlackBerry devices can be addicting they can be dangerous too.

With automobile accidents on the rise, thanks in part to texting, a handful of companies are coming out with voice-activated products and software that have the potential to save money on traffic tickets and lives.

“If you're looking at your BlackBerry, a number of states including California you can get a ticket if your attention is off the road,” said Rob Enderle, founder of research company Enderle Group. “It’s not too different than folks driving under the influence since your eyes are not on the road.”

Intelligent Mechatronic Systems, a Waterloo, Ontario company that makes vehicle safety systems, will launch its iLane device, which enables your BlackBerry to talk to you at the end of the year.

The device, which comes with Bluetooth enabled headphones, plugs into a car’s cigarette lighter and can read back e-mail, delete e-mail, make phone calls from the address book, browse the calendar and read on-demand news and weather when prompted by a voice command. 

The product even has emotion. If an e-mail has the LOL (laugh out loud) emoticon, the voice read-back will giggle. Users can reply to e-mail with a standard response set up on the iLane Web site or record a MP3 audio response that’s 15 seconds long.

iLane came from IMS’ researchers who were looking for ways to make automobiles safer. With the prevalence of smartphones in the market it was logical to study BlackBerry use in vehicles.

“We were playing around with this and as it became more commercially viable we started to pursue it,” said Tony Cassetta, chief operating officer at IMS. “When you're looking at it there’s over 100 million new smartphones it gets your attention.”

The iLane device, which is being tested with business customers in New York and Toronto will sell for $599 and depending on which carrier sells it, could come with subsidiaries that would lower the price. 

The BlackBerry is IMS' main focus, but the company will also launch the product for Microsoft’s Window Mobile and Symbian in Europe. Other services such as voice-to-text capabilities and traffic alerts are on the future roadmap and will be available as a software upgrade post-launch.

“When you sitting in the car you never have to take our hands off the wheel or eyes off the road,” said Cassetta.

Taking a software approach, vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass. speech recognition technology company, earlier this month launched a service for the BlackBerry that lets you make phone calls and search the mobile Internet via voice commands. 

The software, which can be downloaded at vLingo.com for free, will translate your speech into text and send back text-based information. For instance if you want to know the address of a restaurant in Boston or what the weather will be all you would have to do is ask your BlackBerry. The service lets users send emails and text messages, search the Web, open applications, dial phones and look up contacts.

“The one thing that’s unique about our service is we understand any word that is spoken,” said Dave Grannan, president and chief executive of vlingo. He said the service learns the user’s voice and improves each time it’s used. Grannan noted that future versions of the software could have the ability to read the information back to the user instead of just via text.

“The iPhone revolutionized the touch user interface and this is the same but with voice. We are trying to create a voice interface for mobile,” he said. vlingo, which got over 20,000 downloads in the first two weeks it was offered, will launch the software for iPhone at the end of the third quarter and for Windows mobile at the end of the fourth quarter.

Tellme, a subsidiary of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft also has a voice activated service for BlackBerry. Like vlingo, Tellme’s service is free to download and lets you access information like directions, movies, traffic information and weather via voice. Since Tellme’s service works with the local Internet it can recognize your most recent position based on GPS and give you local results. If you say “maps” you’ll see a map of your current location. You can change the map location by saying a different city. You can also get movie listings, buy movie tickets, see weather reports and traffic updates simply by saying the keyword from the main screen.